166 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



by the brilliant labours of its noble pilots on the deep, the men who, 

 whether wearing the names of Bacon, Boyle, or Newton, have achieved 

 for it a broad empire of glory — it has passed safely through a chaos of 

 confusion into a region of promise, of beauty, and of truth. 



Strange, indeed, were those crude ideas of Kepler, or the more 

 curious cobwebs of Huygens, which endeavoured to limit the num- 

 ber of our companion orbs to geometrical and arithmetical fictions 

 which those philosophers had propounded. Strange. in themselves, 

 but infinitely more clumsy, when compared with the progress of as- 

 tronomy during the past fifty years. The brilliant discovery, in 1781, 

 of the planet Uranus, by the great Sir William Herschel seems to have 

 opened up a new field of research for the genius which was then hid- 

 den in the womb of the future. That discovery, one of the most im- 

 portant in the historj'- of observation, seemed to confirm, in its full 

 integrity and spirit, the expression given to the law of gravitation by 

 Newton, and established a principle of primary importance in the 

 science of astronomy itself It is strange that that very planet should, 

 in so few years, become the index to one still farther embosomed in 

 the deeps, and point out, by the very necessity of its conformability to 

 law, the existence of an orb more wonderful and majestic than itself, 

 and aid in the extension of our solar system to twice its former sup- 

 posed limits. Yet it was only the endeavour to square the motions of 

 Uranus with the elements, calculated by Herschel, that induced two 

 young men, in two different countries, simultaneously to enter into 

 such a minute examination of all the recorded observations of the 

 planet, as should lead in each case to the discovery of another. 



A grand triumph, that — of the infallibility of law and the validity 

 of theory as an instrument. Here is a young man perplexed by the 

 erratic movements of a planet, setting out to explore its perturbations, 

 in the endeavour to read in these perturbations themselves the cause 

 which may have produced them. He goes on step by step, guided by 

 an unerring system of analysis, and ultimately discovers lurkingthere 

 in that mass of intricate phenomena a great and beautiful orb — a new 

 world, another link in the chain by which all are bound together. 

 Leverrier was not content with knowing it was there, but he took the 

 plummet into his hand and weighed the new world against it ; he 

 determined the weight, diameter, relative bulk, direction of motion, 

 and distance from the sun of the discovered stranger ; nay, even more ; 

 he pointed to the very spot in the heavens where it should be found ; 



