Abstract
ASTRONOMY, in some of its forms, reaches back to the most distant historical epochs, and the changes that it has undergone during this long lapse of time give to this science a peculiar interest. In no other branch of human knowledge have we such a long and continuous history of the search after truth, of the painful struggle through which men have passed in freeing themselves from theories approved by the wise of their own times, and in overthrowing beliefs which had become incorporated into the life and culture of those times. Perhaps the grand array of the heavens, and the vast phenomena which they display, naturally led men to the invention of complicated theories; but these passed away at last before the test of observation and the criticism of sceptical men; and the Copernican theory of our solar system, Kepler's laws of elliptical motion, and the Newtonian law of gravitation, gave to astronomy a real scientific character.
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Prof. Asaph Hall on the Progress of Astronomy 1 . Nature 22, 570–574 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022570a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022570a0