Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/656

636 Astrology and horoscopy, from which even the keen intellects of Kepler and Tycho de Brahe could not disentangle themselves, and to which the still more modern genius of Goethe paid a characteristic tribute in the story of his nativity, were only this anthropocentric conceit masquerading as science, and leaving vestiges of itself in such common words as "ill-starred" and "lunatic."

Comets were universally regarded as portents of disasters, sent expressly as warnings for the reproof and reformation of mankind; tempests and lightnings were feared as harbingers of divine wrath and instruments of punishment for human transgression. According to the Rev. Increase Mather, God took the trouble to eclipse the sun in August, 1673, merely to prognosticate the death of the President of Harvard College and of two colonial governors, all of whom "died within a twelvemonth after." This is but a single example of the wide prevalence and general acceptance of a popular superstition constantly tested and easily proved by the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Bayle, in his Divers Thoughts on Comets (Pensées Diverses sur les Comètes), ridicules the foolish pride and vanity of man, who imagines that "he can not die without disturbing the whole course of Nature and compelling the heavens to put themselves to fresh expense in order to light his funeral pomp."

Not only were the fruits of the earth made to grow for human sustenance, but the flowers of the field were supposed to bud and blossom, putting on their gayest attire and emitting their sweetest perfume, solely as a contribution to human happiness; and it was deemed one of the mysteries and mistakes of Nature, never too much to be puzzled over and wondered at, that these things should spring up and expend their beauty and fragrance in remote places untrodden by the foot of man. Gray expresses this feeling in the oft-quoted lines:

 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Science has finally and effectually taken this conceit out of man by showing that the flower blooms not for the purpose of giving him agreeable sensations, but for its own sake, and that it presumed to put forth sweet and beautiful blossoms long before he appeared on the earth as a rude cave-haunting and flint-chipping savage.

The color and odor of the plant are designed not so much to please man as to attract insects, which promote the process of fertilization and thus insure the preservation of the species. The gratification of man's aesthetic sense and taste for the beautiful does not enter into Nature's intentions; and although the flower may bloom unseen by any human eye, it does not on that