INTRODUCTION. 47 



certainty ana simplicity in the exposition of facts i.nd their 

 mutual connection, which characterise the celestial portion Oi 

 the Cosmos. It is not improbable that the difference to which 

 we allude may furnish an explanation of the cause which, in 

 the earliest ages of intellectual culture amongst the Greeks, 

 directed the natural philosophy of the Pythagoreans with 

 more ardour to the heavenly bodies and the regions of space, 

 than to the earth and its productions, and how through Philo- 

 laiis, and subsequently through the analogous views of Aris- 

 tarchus of Samos, and of Seleucus of Erythrea, this science 

 has been made more conducive to the attainment of a know- 

 ledge of the true system of the world, than the natural philo- 

 sophy of the Ionian school could ever be to the physical 

 history of the earth. Giving but little attention to the pro- 

 perties and specific differences of matter filling space, the 

 great Italian school, in its Doric gravity, turned by pre- 

 ference towards all that relates to measure, to the form of 

 bodies, and to the number and distances of the planets;* 

 whilst the Ionian physicists directed their attention to the 

 qualities of matter, its true or supposed metamorphoses, and 

 to relations of origin. It was reserved for the powerful 

 genius of Aristotle, alike profoundly speculative and practical, 

 to sound with equal success the depths of abstraction and the 

 inexhaustible resources of vital activity pervading the material 

 world. 



Severa 1 highly distinguished treatises on physical geography 

 are prefaced by an introduction, whose purely astronomical 

 sections are directed to the consideration of the earth in its 

 planetary dependence, and as constituting a part of that great 

 system which is animated by one central body, the sun. This 

 course is diametrically opposed to the one which I propose 

 following. In order adequately to estimate the dignity of the 

 Cosmos, it is requisite that the sidereal portion, termed by 

 Kant the natural history of the heavens, should not be mads 

 subordinate to the terrestrial. In the science of the Cosmos, 

 according to the expression of Aristarchus of Samos, the 

 pioneer of the Copernican system, the sun with its satellites 

 was nothing more than one of the innumerable stars by w r hich 

 space is occupied. The physical history of the world must, 



* Compare Ottfried Mailer's JJonen, bu. i , s. 365. 



