hemselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
thousands and tens of thousands.

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.

A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger
Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of
power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times