Volume 1
The gallery of nature and art; or, a tour through creation and science / [Edited] By the Rev. Edward Polehampton [assisted by distinguised writers in the various departments].
- Polehampton, Edward (Edward Thomas William), 1777?-1830.
- Date:
- 1817
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The gallery of nature and art; or, a tour through creation and science / [Edited] By the Rev. Edward Polehampton [assisted by distinguised writers in the various departments]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![founded his school. All the astronomical truths of the Ionian school, were taught on a more extended scale in that of Pythagoras; but what principally distinguished it, was the knowledge of the two motions of the earth on itself, and about the sun. Pythagoras carefully concealed this from the vulgar, in imitation of the Egyp- tian priests, from whom, most probably, he derived his knowledge; but his system was more fully explained, and more openly avowed by bis disciple Philalaus. According to the Pythagorists, not only the planets, but the comets themselves, are in motion round the sun. These are not fleeting meteors formed in the atmosphere, but the mighty works of nature. These opinions, so perfectly correct on the system of the universe, have been admitted and inculcated by Seneca, with the enthusiasm which a great idea, on the subject the most vast of hu- man contemplation, naturally excited in the soul of a philosopher. “ Let us not wonder,” says he, “ that we are still ignorant of the law of the motion of comets, whose appearance is so rare, that we neither can tell the beginning nor the end of the revolution of these bodies, which descend to us from an immense distance. It is not fifteen hundred years since the stars have been numbered in Greece, and names given to the constellations. The day will come, when, by the continued study of successive ages, things which are now hid, will appear with certainty, and posterity will wonder they have escaped our notice. The same school taught that the planets were inhabited, and that the stars were suns disseminated in space, being themselves centres of planetary systems. These philosophic views should, from their grandeur and justness, have obtained the suffrages of antiquity; but having been taught with systematic speculations, such as the har- mony of the heavenly spheres, and wanting, moreover, that proof which has since been obtained, by the agreement with observations, it is not surprising that their truth, when opposed to the illusions of the senses, should not have been admitted. [La Place, Exposition du Syst6me du Monde.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22012722_0001_0040.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
