98 THE BIOLOGY OF DAILY LIFE. 



of science are made not by the professed and pro- 

 fessionally trained student, still less by the salaried 

 professor, but by those who would be regarded as 

 outsiders. 



The history of astronomy tells how man's deepest 

 convictions, supported by the evidence of the senses 

 as well as by the interpretations of the Christian faith 

 itself, were revolutionized by a church dignitary 

 Canon Copernicus. Or if it does not seem so strange, 

 that the learned leisure of an ecclesiastic should be 

 thus employed, at a period, when simply to be able to 

 read, procured the " benefit of clergy," let us take a 

 smaller instance, but perhaps more remarkable, in the 

 incongruity it presents between position and pursuits. 

 Jeremiah Horrox was a young curate of eighteen,* but 

 even at that early age a master of the astronomy of his 

 time. Comparing different tables with his own obser- 

 vations of the planet Venus he found a transit across 

 the sun was to be expected on Dec. 4th, 1639. 



ie Unfortunately the day was Sunday, and his 

 clerical duties prevented his seeing the ingress 

 of the planet upon the solar disk, a circum- 

 stance science has mourned for a century past, 

 and will have reason to mourn for a century to 

 come."t 



Or take a modern instance that of the militia 

 band-conductor and church organist, who became one 

 of the greatest of astronomers, and the founder of a 

 family of discoverers, whose name is not only enrolled 

 in the solar system itself, but by whose laborious 



* I give this 011 the authority of Professor Newcombe. 

 f Popular Astronomy, by Simon Newcombe, Professor U.S; 

 Naval University. Second edit., p. 176. 



