But this is not the only direction in which astronomy has enlarged, or rather has levelled, its boundaries. The unification of the physical sciences is perhaps the greatest intellectual feat of recent times. The process has included astronomy; so that, like Bacon, she may now be said to have "taken all knowledge" (of that kind) "for her province." In return, she proffers potent aid for its increase. Every comet that approaches the sun is the scene of experiments in the electrical illumination of rarefied matter, performed on a huge scale for our benefit. The sun, stars, and nebulæ form so many celestial laboratories, where the nature and mutual relations of the chemical "elements" may be tried by more stringent tests than sublunary conditions afford. The laws of terrestrial magnetism can be completely investigated only with the aid of a concurrent study of the face of the sun. The solar spectrum will perhaps one day, by its recurrent modifications, tell us something of impending droughts, famines, and cyclones.
Astronomy generalises the results of the other sciences. She exhibits the laws of Nature working over a wider area, and under more varied conditions, than ordinary experience presents. Ordinary experience, on the other hand, has become indispensable to her progress. She takes in at one view the indefinitely great and the indefinitely little. The mutual revolutions of the stellar multitude during tracts of time which seem to lengthen out to eternity as the mind attempts to traverse them, she does not admit to be beyond her ken; nor is she indifferent to the constitution of the minutest atom of matter that thrills the ether into light. How she entered upon this vastly expanded inheritance, and how, so far, she has dealt with it, is attempted to be set forth in the ensuing chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The denomination "physical astronomy," first used by Kepler, and long appropriated to this branch of the science, has of late been otherwise applied.
[2] Histoire de l'Astronomie au xviiie Siècle, p. 267.
PART I
PROGRESS OF ASTRONOMY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
FOUNDATION OF SIDEREAL ASTRONOMY
Until nearly a hundred years ago the stars were regarded by practical astronomers mainly as a number of convenient fixed points by which the motions of the various members of the solar system could be determined and compared. Their recognised function, in fact, was that of milestones on the great celestial highway traversed by the planets, as well as on the byways of space occasionally pursued by comets. Not that curiosity as to their nature, and even conjecture as to their origin, were at any period absent. Both were from time to time powerfully stimulated by the appearance of startling novelties in a region described by philosophers as "incorruptible," or exempt from change. The catalogue of Hipparchus probably, and certainly that of Tycho Brahe, some seventeen centuries later, owed each its origin to the temporary blaze of a new star. The general aspect of the skies was thus (however imperfectly) recorded from age to age, and with improved appliances the enumeration was rendered more and more accurate and complete; but the secrets of the stellar sphere remained inviolate.