CHILDHOOD OF SCIENCE. 199 



that he failed to grasp the true, method of discovery. The time 

 had not then arrived for the systematic researches of induction. 

 The great school-master of the new system was not yet abroad. 

 However we cannot but admire the frank unresting mind, the 

 great honest heart, and the fiery questioning spirit of this medi- 

 eval philosopher. His writings tell us the whole story of his 

 mistakes and his successes, his troubles and his rejoicings, his 

 struggles with thought and his struggles with hunger ; for a life 

 of bitter want and disappointment had fallen to the lot of this 

 devoted disciple of learning. " If God stand by me," would he 

 say, " and look to the victuals, I hope to perform something yet." 

 His treatise on the perturbations of Mars reveals greater pertur- 

 bations in his domestic economy. While he searches in vain for 

 the laws of dependence between the planets and their great 

 parent the sun, he bemoans equally the feeble dependence 

 between himself and the numerous little satellites that revolved 

 about him. His great work, " The Harmonies of the World," 

 showed far more the harmonies of a noble spirit that, over the 

 hardships of poverty, the mortifications of failure, and the 

 persecutions of the Wiirtemburg doctors, could look calmly and 

 cheerfully to the glorious meed which posterity would award to 

 his labors if successful. 



Kepler seems to have had a Heaven-born intuition that there 

 was some law of harmony regulating the movements of the 

 solar system. But what was the nature of it, or how he came 

 by the notion, he had no more idea than he had of Newton's 

 Calculus. Yet he set himself to testing by actual figures and 

 trial every conceivable relation that a genius peculiarly fertile in 

 hypotheses could suggest. From Tycho Brahe's observations he 

 calculated the path of Mars through seven oppositions, figuring 

 out each ten times. In the absence of logarithms and the aids 

 of algebra the figures of each calculation covered ten folio pages, 

 making seven hundred pages in all ; an enormous labor in itself, 

 but it was only the first step in his tentative process. His object 

 being to discover what device or complication of curves would 

 agree with the true observed places of Mars, he tested the circle 

 in every possible variation of eccentric and epicycle. But none 



