Improving Natural Knowledge 41 



the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for their 

 husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to 

 their rude navigators? But what has grown out of this 

 search for natural knowledge of so merely useful a char- 

 acter? You all know the reply. Astronomy, which 5 

 of all sciences has filled men's minds with general ideas 

 of a character most foreign to their daily experience, 

 and has, more than any other, rendered it impossible for 

 them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy, 

 which tells them that this so vast and seemingly solid earth 10 

 is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no man knows 

 whither, through illimitable space ; which demonstrates 

 that what we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that 

 space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles 

 are seething and surging, like the waves of an angry sea; 15 

 which opens up to us infinite regions where nothing is 

 known, or ever seems to have been known, but matter and 

 force, operating according to rigid rules ; which leads us to 

 contemplate phenomena the very nature of which demon- 

 strates that they must have had a beginning, and that they 20 

 must have an end, but the very nature of which also proves 

 that the beginning was, to our conceptions of time, in- 

 finitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably 

 distant. 



But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who 25 

 ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless 

 than the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping 

 it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? But 

 out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's ab- 

 horrence of a vacuum ; and then it was discovered that 30 

 Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight ; 

 and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all 

 matter has weight, and that the force which produces 

 weight is co-extensive with the universe, in short, to 



