14 ^ag Stcnums, (Essmjs, rmfr U*bieba*. fi 



one, to an ancient people, than that they should learn 

 ("he exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for their 

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

 their rude navigators 1 But what has grown out of this 

 search for natural knowledge of so merely useful a 

 character? You all know the reply. Astronomy, 

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

 ideas of a character most foreign to their daily ex- 

 perience, 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 is but an atom among atoms, 

 whirling, no man knows whither, through illimitable 

 space ; which demonstrates that what we call the peace- 

 ful 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 ; 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 phsenomena the very nature of which 

 demonstrates that they must have had a beginning, and 

 that they must have an end, but the very nature of 

 which also proves that the beginning was, to our concep- 

 tions of time, infinitely remote, and that the end is as 

 immeasurably distant. 



But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who 

 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 

 abhorrence of a vacuum ; and then it was discovered 

 that 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 



