CHILDHOOD OF SCIENCE. 189 



In the last half of the sixteenth century literature had its 

 most flourishing period ; when Queen Elizabeth (15581603), as 

 well from her own elevated tastes as from a peculiar spite at the 

 Puritans, extended the patronage of royalty to talent, especially 

 the dramatic ; when Sidney paraded his heroes in the "Arcadia," 

 and Spencer sang the allegory of the " Faerie Queen ; " when 

 Shakspeare new-vamped kings and immortalized them in tragedy, 

 while " rare Ben. Jonson " did the same for their fools in comedy. 



But the brightest constellation of genius was seen rising on the 

 world in the year sixteen hundred. It was then that Francis 

 Bacon was preparing the canons of his new philosophy ; that 

 Napier, the Baron of Merchiston, was following up that splendid 

 mathematical induction which ended in the discovery of Logar- 

 ithms ; that Tycho Brahe was just closing at Prague his memor- 

 able observations on the planets. It was then that Galileo was 

 wrestling with the forces of nature, making himself strong for 

 the great contest with the schools, and the fiery Kepler was 

 searching in the heavens for the unwritten laws of creation. 

 Thus was science the last-born of the brotherhood of Letters 

 the latest but the mightiest leader in the second march of 

 civilization. 



The first and by much the hardest task of every new instructor 

 is to unteach the errors and unseat the prejudices which have 

 found a lodgment in the universal mind. For the purpose 

 therefore of bringing out the earliest struggles of the school of 

 science, we must first unfold the errors and prejudices with 

 which it had to contend. 



In the scope of the sciences dependent on observation, astrol- 

 ogy was the great and universal error of the early ages. It was 

 observed that the sun regulated nearly all the phenomena of 

 nature, as the growth and death of vegetation, the changes of 

 seasons and climate, the life and habits of animals. The moon 

 also had her influences, directly in the ebb and flow of the tides, 

 indirectly, as was generally thought and as many still think, in 

 the determination of the weather, and in all the critical condi- 

 tions of plant and animal life. From such premises the leap to 

 the conclusion that the planets and the stars had much to do with 



