68 COSMOS. 



ought to be accessible to all, has always been greatly in oppo- 

 sition to my own practice ; and whenever I have enlarged 

 upon the established nomenclature, it has only been in the 

 specialities of descriptive botany and zoology, where the in- 

 troduction of hitherto unknown objects rendered new names 

 necessary. The denominations of physical descriptions of the 

 universe, or physical cosmography, which I use indiscrimin- 

 ately, have been modeled upon those o^ physical descriptions 

 of the earth, that is to say, physical geography, terms that 

 have long been in common use. Descartes, whose genius was 

 one of the most powerful manifested in any age, has left us a 

 few fragments of a great work, which he intended publishing 

 under the title of Monde, and for which he had prepared him 

 self by special studies, including even that of human anatomy. 

 The uncommon, but definite expression of the science of the 

 Cos?nos recalls to the mind of the inhabitant of the earth that 

 we are treating of a more widely-extended horizon — of the 

 assemblage of all things with which space is filled, from the 

 remotest nebulae to the climatic distribution of those delicate 

 tissues of vegetable matter which spread a variegated cover- 

 nig over the surface of our rocks. 



The influence of narrow-minded views peculiar to the ear 

 lier ages of civilization led in all languages to a confusion of 

 ideas in the synonymic use of the words earth and tvo7'ld, 

 while the common expressions voyages round the world, map 

 of the ivorld, and neio world, afford further illustrations of the 

 same confusion. The more noble and precisely-defined ex- 

 pressions of system of the world, the planetary world, and 

 creation and age of the world, relate either to the totality of 

 the substances by which space is filled, or to the origin of tho 

 whole universe. 



It was natural that, in the midst of the extreme variability 

 of phenomena presented by the surface of our globe, and the 

 aerial ocean by which it is surrounded, man should have been 

 impressed by the aspect of the vault of heaven, and the uni- 

 form and regular movements of the sun and planets. Thus 

 the word Cosmos, which primitively, in the Homeric ages, in- 

 dicated an idea of order and harmony, was subsequently adopt- 

 ed in scientific language, where it was gradually applied to 

 the order observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies, 

 to the whole universe, and then finally to the world in which 

 this harmony was reflected to us. According to the assertion 

 of Philolaiis, whose fragmentary works have been so ably com- 

 mented upon by Bockh, and conformably to the general testi* 



