Volume 1

The pursuit of knowledge under difficulties / [George L. Craik].

  • George Lillie Craik
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pursuit of knowledge under difficulties / [George L. Craik]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which we have reason to believe has not previously been observed l Let it be at least verified and re- corded. No truth is altogether barren; and even that which looks at first sight the very simplest and most trivial, may turn out fruitful in precious results. It seems, after it is stated and described to us, to have been an exceedingly obvious thought which struck Galileo, when, alter having ascertained the regular oscillation of the pendulum, he proposed em- ploying it as a measure of time. Some, indeed, may imagine that there was no such extraordinary merit as is generally supposed even in the grand conjecture of Newton, and that it amounted, after all, merely to the application of a law to the movements of the hea- venly bodies, which was already known to affect at least every body in the immediate neighbourhood of the earth. But these things are only simple after the} are explained. Slight and transparent as we may think the veil to have been which covered the truths alluded to, and others of a similar nature, immedi- ately before they were detected, it is yet an unques- tionable fact that this veil had been sufficient to con- ceal them, for thousands of years, from the observation of all the world. The phenomenon of a heavy body swinging to and fro from a point of suspension had been familiar to every general ion from the very earliest times; and yet, although men had long been very de- sirous of possessing an accurate and convenient mea- sure of time, and had resorted in different countries to a great variety of contrivances to attain that object, nobody before Galileo had thought of effecting it by means of the pendulum. And, in the same manner, with regard to the law of gravitation : the fact of all bodies having a tendency to fall to the earth must of course have forced itself upon the attention of the very earliest inhabitants of our globe, every day and hour of their existence. Indeed, the law in nearly
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