ASTRONOMY 



HERBERT MEREDITH REESE 

 Assistant Professor of Physics 



TYPES OF SCIENCES 



The late Professor Rowland, my most honored teacher, 

 once told his class that there are only two natural sciences, 

 physics and chemistry. On second thought he added to these 

 biology, but said that astronomy and geology are not worthy 

 the name of science at all. Certainly most of us will disagree 

 with him, for perhaps no other branch of learning has appealed 

 to the popular mind so forcibly as astronomy. In fact it 

 seemed at one time in this country that the easiest way for 

 a college president to obtain money was to persuade some 

 wealthy man to endow an observatory to be called after his 

 own name. 



Still, if we examine Rowland's statement carefully, with 

 due allowance for his eccentricities, I think we shall see that 

 he was really classifying the sciences into groups, first, 

 physics, chemistry, and experimental biology ; second, 

 astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology. It happened 

 that Rowland was keenly interested in the first group and 

 cared little or nothing for the second. But that need not con- 

 cern us here. The important thing is that the classification is 

 a natural and just one. For the first group is concerned 

 mainly with the determination of those invariable laws accord- 

 ing to which nature works, or, to be more precise, the condi- 

 tions under which certain kinds of recurrent phenomena 

 occur at any time or any place. For instance, we have the 

 fundamental laws of motion, the law of multiple proportions 



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