man. And no doubt Flamsteed's[133] observations, twenty
or thirty of them at least, were of signal use. But how? A somewhat
fanciful thinker, one Kepler, had hit upon the approximate orbits of the
planets by trying one hypothesis after another: he found the _ellipse_,
which the Platonists, well despised of Bacon, and who would have despised
him as heartily if they had known him, had investigated and put ready to
hand nearly 2000 years before.[134] The sun in the focus, the motions of
the planet more and more rapid as they approach the sun, led Kepler--and
Bacon would have reproved him for his rashness--to imagine that a force
residing in the sun might move the planets, a force inversely as the
distance. Bouillaud,[135] upon a fanciful analogy, rejected the inverse
distance, {88} and, rejecting the force altogether, declared that if such a
thing there were, it would be as the inverse _square_ of the distance.
Newton, ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall
of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as
compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold
for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of
the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, upon the assumed theory of
_universal_ gravitation. He found result after result of his theory in
conformity with observed fact: and, by aid of Flamsteed's observations,
which amended what mathematicians call his _constants_, he constructed his
lunar theory. Had it not been for Newton, the whole dynasty of Greenwich
astronomers, from Flamsteed of happy memory, to Airy whom Heaven
preserve,[136] might have worked away at nightly observation and daily
reduction, without any remarkable result: looking forward, as to a
millennium, to the time when any man of moderate intelligence was to see
the whole explanation. What are large collections of facts for? To make
theories _from_, says Bacon: to try ready-made theories _by_, says the
history of discovery: it's all the same, says the idolater: nonsense, say
we!

Time and space run short: how odd it is that of the three leading ideas of
mechanics, time, space, and matter, the first two should always fail a
reviewer before the third. We might dwell upon many points, especially if
we attempted a more descriptive account of the valuable edition before us.
No one need imagine that the editors, by their uncompromising attack upon
the notion of Baco