Page:Herschel - A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831).djvu/41

 home to every mind from their notoriety and unequivocal character. The prediction of eclipses has accordingly from the earliest ages excited the admiration of mankind, and been one grand instrument by which their allegiance (so to speak) to natural science, and their respect for its professors, has been maintained; and though strangely abused in unenlightened ages by the supernatural pretensions of astrologers, the credence given even to their absurdities shows the force of this kind of evidence on men's minds. The predictions of astronomers are, however, now far too familiar to endanger the just equipoise of our judgment, since even the return of comets, true to their paths and exact to the hour of their appointment, has ceased to amaze, though it must ever delight all who have souls capable of being penetrated by such beautiful instances of accordance between theory and facts. But the age of mere wonder in such things is past, and men prefer being guided and enlightened, to being astonished and dazzled. Eclipses, comets, and the like, afford but rare and transient displays of the powers of calculation, and of the certainty of the principles on which it is grounded. A page of "lunar distances" from the Nautical Almanack is worth all the eclipses that have ever happened for inspiring this necessary confidence in the conclusions of science. That a man, by merely measuring the moon's apparent distance from a star with a little portable instrument held in his hand, and applied to his eye, even with so unstable a footing as the deck of a ship, shall say positively, within five miles, where he is, on a boundless ocean, cannot but appear to persons ignorant of