Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/58

 the Mariner’s Compass was known in Europe, and treatises on the use of the Astrolabe continued to appear down nearly to the end of the sixteenth century. The Ptolemaic theory of the Solar System was wrong, but it served to calculate eclipses by as well as the Copernican.

But Second. We, with our narrow span of life, are naturally in a hurry for results. What comes not in our own time seems delayed indefinitely, and we feel as little children do when they dig up the ground in their impatience to learn whether the seeds they planted have yet begun to sprout. It was thus once supposed that in the realm of nature effect followed cause in quick succession, and it was little thought how slow is the action of those powers which have by their continuance upheaved mountains, or have hollowed out deep seas. So, too, in the world of intellect the remote consequences of a discovery are long in disclosing themselves, impossible to be foreseen. No gift of second sight showed at the time to anyone the electric telegraph in Franklin’s experiment made a hundred and twenty years ago. Harvey admired the