IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 25 



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 

 experience, and has, more than any other, rendered it im- 

 possible for them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astron- 5 

 omy, 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 demon- 

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

 but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose 10 

 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 phenomena the very nature of which demon- 15 

 strates that they 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 conceptions of time, infinitely re- 

 mote, and that the end is as immeasurably distant. 



But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask 20 

 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 25 

 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 coextensive with the universe, 

 in short, to the theory of universal gravitation and endless 

 force, while learning how to handle gases led to the dis-3 

 covery of oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the 

 notion of the indestructibility of matter. 



Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the 

 attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the 



