202 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OP THE CONTEMPLATION 



ledge of nature, in respect to form and measurement on the 

 earth and in the regions of space, to the heterogeneity of 

 substances, and to the powers or forces resident therein. The 

 discovery and exploration of the New Continent, with its 

 lofty Cordilleras and their numerous volcanoes, its elevated 

 plateaus with successive stages of climate placed one above 

 another, and its various vegetation ranging through 120 

 degrees of latitude, mark incontestably the period in which 

 there was offered to the human mind, in the smallest space 

 of time, the greatest abundance of new physical perceptions. 

 Thenceforward the extension of cosmical knowledge has no 

 longer been connected with political events acting within 

 definite localities. Prom that period the human intellect 

 has brought forth great things by virtue of its own proper 

 strength ; and instead of being principally incited thereto by 

 the influence of extraneous events, it now works simul- 

 taneously in many directions: by new combinations of 

 thought it creates for itself new organs, wherewith to examine, 

 on the one hand, the wide regions of celestial space, and, on 

 the other, the delicate tissues of animal and vegetable struc- 

 ture which form the substratum of life. The whole of the 

 seventeenth century, brilliantly opened by the great discovery 

 of the telescope and by the more immediate fruits of that 

 discovery, from Galileo's observations of Jupiter's satellites, 

 the crescent form of the disk of Yenus, and the solar spots, 

 to Newton's theory of gravitation, is distinguished as the 

 most important epoch of a newly created "physical 

 astronomy." We here find, therefore, once more a marked 

 epoch, characterised by unity in the endeavours devoted to 

 the observation of the heavens and to mathematical re- 

 search; it forms a well-defined section in the great process 



