28 FROM NEBULA TO NEBULA 



matician than Newton) was universally hailed as the su- 

 premest conception of man, but we have lived to see it 

 laid aside. Newton, too, hero-worshiping reader, was 

 ordinary flesh and blood like ourselves, and fallible even 

 as Ptolemy or Laplace. Not only that, but he lived in an 

 age when the bible was still regarded as a scientific 

 authority ; when the Inquisition was not yet dead ; when 

 witch-burning was a religious rite ; when the earth and 

 the entire solar system were generally believed to be only 

 a few thousand years old ; when Uranus, Neptune and the 

 asteroids had not yet been discovered; when the sun's 

 motion was not even guessed; when the spectroscope was 

 undreamed of ; before the mechanical theory of heat was 

 discovered ; before the accuracy of his law of the inverse 

 square had been impugned ; and before his theory of tides 

 had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Shall 

 we now wave aside these important considerations, and, 

 with the bigot's finality, proclaim that "Newton's science 

 is good enough for us ' ', and that, hedged about though he 

 was with the narrow limitations of his age, he could com- 

 mit no error? Now that we know so many more basic 

 astronomical facts than Newton did, why should we seek 

 to crowd them all into the superstructure of theory only, 

 rather than to employ them in broadening, strengthen- 

 ing, repairing, and remodeling the foundations that stand 

 in such sore need of attention ? 



For a reason easy enough to understand, the field of 

 astronomy since Newton's death particularly, has be- 

 come monopolized by mathematicians to the exclusion of 

 everyone else. Far be it from me to decry mathematics 

 as such, since it is verily the only exact science we have, 

 or to charge mathematicians, as a class, with being worse 

 versed in their subject than other professional men in 

 theirs. On the other hand, I can scarcely agree with 

 Doctor Abbot that mathematicians so ' ' immeasurably ex- 

 cel" their fellowmen that they can afford to despise ex- 

 traneous suggestions, nor with Doctor Thomas Jefferson 

 Jackson See, the celebrated mathematician and astron- 

 omer, who says, "not only must the astronomer be the 

 wisest and intellectually the most penetrating of men, but 



