184 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITTJTION, 1916. 



])assage (Hakluyt, Vol. VIII) is a gem of accurate astronomy, and 

 I shall read it to you, for every point mentioned is relevant and the 

 conclusion quite justified and near the truth : 



The 15 of September the moone was there eclipsed, and began to be darkened 

 presently after the setting of the sunne, about sixe of the clocke at night, being 

 then Equinoctial vernal in that country. The said eclipse happened the 

 16 day in the morning before one of the clocke in England, which Is about 

 sixe houres difference, agreeing to one quarter of the V^^orld from the IMeridian 

 of England, towards the West. 



Now, take a long step from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. 

 Passing by a fastidious and academic writer like Tennyson, we fi^nd 

 a mind as careless of fact and untrammeled by convention as Mark 

 Twain deriving perpetual delight from the mere scope and scale of 

 things astronomical in its revelation of the very size of the world 

 as measured in millions upon millions of any units we can tell off. 

 It may be hard to say exactly what this proves, but we may allow it 

 to suffuse the continual plodder with a gentle glow of satisfaction, 

 for without his continual plodding it would never have come to pass. 



Undoubtedly the last word of astronomy must be heard before we 

 can solve the problem of the philosophers upon its material side and 

 jDlace man in true relation to the universe. 



I suppose it is evolution that has made us feel responsible for the 

 universe, incurring thereby, it must be confessed, a very heavy 

 responsibility with fate — a debt that would cause serious anxiety 

 had not philosophy long since become reconciled to permanent bank- 

 ruptcy. I mean that before evolution became one of our fixed ideas 

 "man's place in nature" was an expression to which only an arbi- 

 trary meaning could be attached. There was no obligation to con- 

 nect the phenomena of the universe in one long chain. Nothing is 

 more illuminating as to our change of view than to read the words 

 of one of the lesser lights of the eighteenth century — for example, 

 Thomas Wright, of Durham, is an author who is often mentioned 

 alongside Immanuel Kant as having foresight of the nebular hy- 

 pothesis, the great evolutionary scheme of astronomy. Without 

 depreciating the insight and the breadth of Wright's views on ex- 

 tended stellar systems the defect — ^the perfect defect of any evolu- 

 tionary glimpse in them — strikes one now as an almost painful 

 incompetence. We are sensible of the necessity of connecting all the 

 parts of our system. That is the general interest in a sur^'ey of the 

 sky, outside of professional interest in a difficulty overcome and of 

 curiosity — which, indeed, is soon bored by mere magnitude — and 

 that is the reason why we come back to it again and again, especially 

 row that we are beginning from more than one avenue to approach 

 some reliable, and one hopes some permanent, point of view. 



