their husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to their rude
navigators? But what has grown out of this search for natural knowledge
of so merely useful a character? You all know the reply.
Astronomy,--which of all sciences has filled men's minds with general
ideas of a character most foreign to their daily experience, and has,
more than any other, rendered it impossible for them to accept the
beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy,--which tells them that this so
vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no
man knows whither, through illimitable space; which demonstrates that
what we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that space, filled by
an infinitely subtle matter whose particles are seething and surging,
like the waves of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions
where nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known, but matter
and force, operating according to rigid rules; which leads us to
contemplate phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they
must have had a beginning, and that they must have an end, but the very
nature of which also proves that the beginning was, to our conceptions
of time, infinitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably
distant.

But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread and
receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and
distribute water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly
utilitarian? But out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's
abhorrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that Nature does not
abhor a vacuum, but that air has weight; and that notion paved the way
for the doctrine that all matter has weight, and that the force which
produces weight is co-extensive with the universe,--in short, to the
theory of universal gravitation and endless force. While learning how
to handle gases led to the discovery of oxygen, and to modern