636 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Astrology and lioroscopy, from which even the keen intellects 

 of Kepler and Tycho de Brahe could not disentangle themselves, 

 and to which the still more modern genius of Goethe paid a char- 

 acteristic tribute in the story of his nativity, were only this an- 

 thropocentric conceit masquerading as science, and leaving vestiges 

 of itself in such common words as " ill-starred " and " lunatic." 



Comets were universally regarded as portents of disasters, sent 

 expressly as warnings for the reproof and reformation of man- 

 kind ; tempests and lightnings were feared as harbingers of 

 divine wrath and instruments of punishment for human transgres- 

 sion. According to the Rev. Increase Mather, God took the trou- 

 ble to eclipse the sun in August, 1673, merely to prognosticate the 

 death of the President of Harvard College and of two colonial 

 governors, all of whom "died within a twelvemonth after." This 

 is but a single example of the wide prevalence and general accept- 

 ance of a popular superstition constantly tested and easily proved 

 by the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter Jioc. Bayle, in his 

 Divers Thoughts on Comets {Pensees Diverses sur les Cometes), 

 ridicules the foolish pride and vanity of man, who imagines that 

 " he can not die without disturbing the whole course of Nature 

 and compelling the heavens to put themselves to fresh expense in 

 order to light his funeral pomp." 



Not only were the fruits of the earth made to grow for human 

 sustenance, but the flowers of the field were supposed to bud and 

 blossom, putting on their gayest attire and emitting their sweetest 

 perfume, solely as a contribution to human happiness ; and it was 

 deemed one of the mysteries and mistakes of Nature, never too 

 much to be puzzled over and wondered at, that these things 

 should spring up and expend their beauty and fragrance in re- 

 mote places untrodden by the foot of man. Gray expresses this 

 feeling in the oft-quoted lines : 



"Fnll many a flower is born to blush unseen, 

 And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 



Science has finally and effectually taken this conceit out of 

 man by showing that the flower blooms not for the purpose of 

 giving him agreeable sensations, but for its own sake, and that it 

 presumed to put forth sweet and beautiful blossoms long before he 

 appeared on the earth as a rude cave-haunting and flint-chipping 

 savage. 



The color and odor of the plant are designed not so much to 

 please man as to attract insects, which promote the process of fer- 

 tilization and thus insure the preservation of the species. The 

 gratification of man's aesthetic sense and taste for the beautiful 

 does not enter into Nature's intentions ; and although the flower 

 may bloom unseen by any human eye, it does not on that ac- 



