32 HISTORY OF ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERY. 



philosophical fact a style still in vogue, which shows its propriety, for we never speak of 

 the globe rotating in common speech, but of the sun rising and setting ; and we are guilty 

 of no false philosophy in popularly assigning fixidity to the earth, and speaking of its 

 repose. Yet, overlooking the plain design and popular style of Scripture rigidly con 

 struing the latter the theologians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centm-ies, in great 

 numbers, regarded the sacred record as teaching the sun's daily apparent procession 

 through the heavens, and the earth's stability, as physical facts, and hence denounced the 

 Copernicans as heretics in religion, and deluded in philosophy. The controversy that 

 ensued deserves attention, because, in a precisely similar way in our own times, the Scrip 

 tures have been arrayed against geology. The termination of the former contest should 

 have been a monitory example to some modern exponents of holy writ, not to assume 

 their expositions to be right and the geologists wrong, but to admit the possibility of 

 being fallible interpreters themselves. 



Before the death of Galileo the telescope had been adapted to instruments for mea 

 suring angular distances. A countryman of our own, of the name of Gascoyne, who 

 became a soldier in the civil war, and was slain while yet a youth in the battle of 

 Marston Moor, is the first person recorded as having applied the telescope to the 

 quadrant. This improvement in the art of observing perished with him, and was not 

 known again in practice until a quarter of a century afterwards, when it appeared in 

 France as a new invention. The same ingenious and unfortunate individual was the first 

 constructor of the micrometer, by which the diameters of celestial objects are taken ; and 

 this likewise remained unknown, to be re-discovered at the commencement of the eigh 

 teenth century. Practical astronomy also received one of its most beautiful and important 

 acquisitions soon after the telescope, in the application of the pendulum to clocks, afford 

 ing a more exact method of measuring time. This was followed by the invention of the 

 transit instrument, used in determining declination and right ascension, or the distances 

 of the stars and any celestial phenomenon from certain fixed points in the heavens a 

 problem analogous to that of terrestrial latitude and longitude. The former was the 

 work of Huygens, a Hollander, the latter of Roemer, a Dane two invaluable contributions 

 to the furniture of the observatory. But the " optic glass" of the " Tuscan artist " is the 

 chief glory of the seventeenth century among mechanical constructions as the germ of 

 those mighty tubes which, at Greenwich, Dorpat, and Washington, now search the profun 

 dities of space utterly insignificant, indeed, when compared with them, as much so as 

 the seedling to the tree which a thousand years has braved the breeze, yet still the 

 germ ! A cylinder of lead, a few inches long, with two spectacle-glasses at its extremities, 

 one convex, and the other concave the plaything of a child was the original tele 

 scope ; yet, even in the day of its feebleness, it was sufficiently strong to break down the 

 barrier which had arrested the knowledge of all antiquity, and manifest to the gaze of 

 man what had successfully defied his glance for ages the lunar steppes, highlands, and 

 n.vines Venus in phase Jupiter surrounded with his servitors and Saturn's strange 

 and then inexplicable structure. 



