1834.] European Science. 251 



ignorance begins ; thereby indicating the most promising lines of investigation 

 for future explorers, and obviating all the useless and ungrateful labour of re- 

 discovery. 



Perhaps the most finished of these essays is Mr. Airy's astronomy. He 

 notes, as characteristic of its progress in England, during the present century, an 

 exclusive attention to the perfection of instruments, and a zeal for accumulating 

 observations, which remain useless until they are reduced and applied by the 

 expert and ingenious analysts of the continent. But how many thousands of these 

 must be lost in their original form, for ever unknown to the skilful metallurgists, 

 who could extract the valuable metal from this heap of ore ! The public gratitude 

 will not be withheld from those who thus sacrifice fortune, time, and health, to the 

 comparatively humble toil of observation, and it will be long before the Baconian 

 mode of seeking for truth can be undervalued ; but surely there is a savour of 

 ultraism in this blind devotion to the occupation of storing up barren facts, to the 

 total neglect of moderate generalization. It should not be forgotten that, in 

 nearly all the physical sciences, several of the most brilliant discoveries have been 

 the result of happy guesses, which gave a new and infinitely more productive 

 direction to the views of investigators. Astronomy, in short, is in want of what 

 Lyell has so ably done for geology. Conclusions, bearing to each other the most 

 striking relations of analogy, are allowed to stand as ultimate and isolated facts ; while 

 by connecting them, not only would their own authenticity be more firmly esta- 

 blished, but they would directly lead to others which might without this aid be un- 

 attainable. 



Thus the recent annals of astronomy are full of scattered evidences of a con- 

 stant process of uncompensated attraction, whereby nebulae are converted into 

 stars, and separate stars converted probably into binary or multiple systems. 

 Instead of regarding the proper motion of the stars as merely the result of the 

 universal law by which they all tend to approach one another in times inversely 

 proportional to their respective masses, and to the squares of their respective dis- 

 tances, even the enlarged mind of Sir John Herschel has been employed in a 

 fruitless attempt to shew that the only real change of this kind now in progress is 

 the mutual approach of our sun and Hercules, and that the proper motions of other 

 stars are merely a perspective appearance occasioned by their being situated at 

 very different distances from our system. There can be no doubt that many of 

 them depend upon this cause ; but this attempted restriction of a universal law to 

 a single case is a retrograde step in generalization, and an admitted failure. It 

 seems, on the contrary, highly probable that all the stars of the greater magnitudes are 

 approaching our sun in nearly right lines, and are destined, millions of ages hence, 

 to form multiple systems with our sun, and some of the stars in the constellation of 

 Hercules ; whence would arise the necessity of a new creation of organized beings, 

 fitted to exist in the temperatures which would be produced by this new order of 

 things. The complication of attractions to which each star is exposed during this 

 accelerated approach must render the case of actual collision between any pair of 

 them a very uncommon occurrence; instead of impinging upon, they will pass 

 each other, and will thenceforth revolve in ellipses having their common centre of 

 gravity in one focus. That such a process of condensation is going on, we have 

 not only the evidence of the otherwise inexplicable apparent separation of the strars 

 of Hercules ; — the rest of our nebulais undergoing the same change, the milky way visi- 

 bly " breaking up," as Sir W. Herschel expressed it, in many places into similar 



