30 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



occurred to indicate that the operation of the law hs 

 for a moment been suspended ; nothing has ev 

 intimated that nature has been crossed by spontaneoi 

 action, or that a state of things at any time exist 

 which could not be rigorously deduced from 

 preceding state. 



Given the distribution of matter, and the forces 

 operation, in the time of Galileo, the competent math< 

 matician of that day could predict what is now occui 

 in our own. We calculate eclipses in advance, and fii 

 our calculations true to the second. We determine 

 dates of those that have occurred in the early times 

 history, and find calculation and history in harmony 

 Anomalies and perturbations in the planets have be( 

 over and over again observed ; but these, instead 

 demonstrating any inconstancy on the part of nature 

 law, have invariably been reduced to consequences of 

 that law. Instead of referring the perturbations of 

 Uranus to any interference on the part of the Author 

 of nature with the law of gravitation, the question 

 which the astronomer proposed to himself was, * How, 

 in accordance with this law, can the perturbation be 

 produced ? ' Guided by a principle, he was enabled to 

 fix the point of space in which, if a mass of matter 

 were placed, the observed perturbations would follow. 

 We know the result. The practical astronomer turned 

 his telescope towards the region which the intellect of 

 the theoretic astronomer had already explored, and the 

 planet now named Neptune was found in its predicted 

 place. A very respectable outcome, it will be admitted, 

 of an impulse which ' rests upon no rational grounds, 

 and can be traced to no rational principle ; ' which 

 possesses ' no intellectual character ; ' which ' philo- 

 sophy ' has uprooted from * the ground of reason,' and 

 fixed in that ' large irrational department ' discovered 



I 



