328 



SCIENCE 



[N". S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 872 



Had it not been for Newton [writes De Morgan 

 in his "Budget of Paradoses," p. 56] the whole 

 dynasty of Greenwich astronomers, from Flam- 

 steed of happy memory, to Airy, whom Heaven 

 preserve, might have worked away at nightly ob- 

 servation and daily reduction without any remark- 

 able result: looking forward, as to a millennium, 

 to the time when any man of moderate intelligence 

 was to see the whole explanation. What are large 

 collections of facts for? To make theories from, 

 says Bacon; to try ready-made theories 'by, says 

 the history of discovery; it's all the same, says 

 the idolater; nonsense, say we! 



But nothing of this will fit in with what 

 we know of Bradley's work; he discovered 

 aberration, not by any help from Newton, 

 but by accumulating a mass of observa- 

 tions. He had no ready-made hypothesis, 

 or rather he had a wrong one, viz., that the 

 stars would show displacement due to par- 

 allax ; and after this was proved wrong, as 

 it was at the very outset, he had nothing 

 in the way of a theory to guide him, and 

 found great difficulty in devising one after 

 he had collected his facts, which spoke for 

 themselves so far as to reveal plainly the 

 essential features of the phenomenon in 

 question. 



Modern discoveries (on the preceding page of 

 the "B. of P.") have not been made by large 

 collections of facts, with subsequent discussion, 

 separation, and resulting deduction of a truth thus 

 rendered perceptible. 



To this I venture to oppose not only such 

 work as that of Bradley, but much in the 

 recent history of astronomy; the discov- 

 eries about systematic proper motions, 

 about moving clusters, about the growth of 

 velocity with life history, and so forth. 



There is an attempt at induction going on, 

 which has yielded little or no fruit, the observa- 

 tions made in the meteorological observatories. 

 The attempt is carried on in a manner which 

 would have caused Bacon to dance for joy. . . . 

 And what has come of it? Nothing, says M. Biot, 

 and nothing will ever come of it: the veteran 

 mathematician and experimental philosopher de- 

 clares, as does Mr. Ellis, that no single branch of 



science has ever been fruitfully explored in this 

 way. 



De Morgan was a mathematician, and I 

 have noticed that mathematicians are apt 

 to be crisp in their statements : but he is a 

 bold man who says "nothing will ever 

 come of it." Perhaps an equally crisp 

 statement on the other side may be par- 

 doned. I adventure the remark that if 

 nothing has hitherto come of such observa- 

 tions, it is because observers have been mis- 

 led by the very teaching of De Morgan and 

 others who share his views : they have been 

 told that they will do no good without a 

 theory until they have come to believe it; 

 whereas the truth probably lies in a quite 

 different direction. To present my reasons 

 for this proposition I must ask you first to 

 consider in some detail the method of dis- 

 cussing meteorological observations sug- 

 gested some years ago by Professor Schus- 

 ter. He gave an account of it to the 

 Department of Cosmical Physics, over 

 which he presided in 1902, so that I must 

 face some repetition of what he said; but 

 the matter is so important that I trust this 

 may be pardoned. 



Let us compare the records produced on 

 a gramophone disk by the playing of a 

 single instrument and by that of an or- 

 chestra. The first will be comparatively 

 simple, and when suitably magnified will 

 show a series of waves which in certain 

 parts of the record form sequences of great 

 regularity. These represent occasions when 

 the single instrument played a long-sus- 

 tained note, the pitch of which is indicated 

 by the frequency of the wave. If the in- 

 strument plays more loudly, while still 

 keeping to the same note, the heights of 

 the waves will increase, though their fre- 

 quency will not be altered. The exact 

 shape of each wave will represent the qual- 

 ity of tone which characterizes the instru- 

 ment: and if another instrument were to 



