334 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



This method of viewing the heavens seems to throw them into 

 a new kind of light. They are now seen to resemble a luxuriant 

 garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different 

 flourishing beds ; and one advantage we may at least reap from it is, 

 that we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an im- 

 mense duration. For, to continue the simile I have borrowed from 

 the vegetable kingdom, is it not almost the same thing, whether we 

 live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecun- 

 dity, fading, withering, and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast 

 number of specimens selected from every stage through which the plant 

 passes in the course of its existence, be brought at once to our view ? 



With a reminiscence of Descartes, he says : 



I determined to accept nothing on faith, but to see with my own 

 eyes what others had seen before me. . . . When I had carefully 

 and thoroughly perfected the great instrument in all its parts I 

 made systematic use of it in my observations of the heavens, first 

 forming a determination never to pass by any, the smallest, portion 

 of them without due investigation. 



To the eighteenth century also belong elaborate and costly 

 expeditions including one organized by the American Philosoph- 

 ical Society of Philadelphia to observe transits of Venus, as a 

 means for determining the distance from the sun to the earth. 



MATHEMATICAL PROGRESS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. Besides 

 the extension of mathematical ideas and methods to mechanics, 

 astronomy, optics and other branches of physics, chemistry was 

 now also becoming a quantitative science. So Scheele begins a 

 work published in 1777 : 



To resolve bodies skilfully into their components, to discover their 

 properties and to combine them in different ways, is the chief pur- 

 pose of chemistry. 



Richter, in his Stoichiometry (1792-1802), even speaks of 

 chemistry as a branch of applied mathematics. Already the 

 pioneer Robert Boyle had written : 



I confess, that after I began ... to discern how useful mathe- 

 maticks may be made to physicks, I have often wished that I had 



