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Royal Astronomical Society (profe- Time wasted, energies thrown away, ssor Dr. Morgan, of Trinity college truth obscured and falsehood ramCambridge) reviewing a paper by the pant, constitute a charge, so grave author, in the Othenorum for march that coming generations will look 25th, 1865 says, “ The evidence that upon them as the bitterest enemies the earth is round but cumulative of civilization, the heaviest drags and circumstantial, scores of pheno- on the wheels of progress and mena ask, separately and indepen- the most offensive embodiment of dently, what other explanation Can frivolity, pride of learning, and forbe imagined except the sphericitymality, worse than this by their poof the earth? It is thus candi- sition, their standing in the front clly admitted that there is no direct ranks of learning, they deceive the and positive evidence that the earth public. They appear to represent a
solid phalanx of truth and wisdom, is round, that it is only "imagined"
when in reality they are but as the or assumed to be so in order to
flimsy ice of an hour's duration all afford an explanation of " scores of
surface, without substance, or depth, phenomena." This is precisely the
or reliablity, or power to save from language of Copernicus, of Newtion
danger and ultimate destruction. and of all astronomers who have labou
Let the practice of theorising red to prove the rotundity of the
be abandoned as one oppresive to the earth. It is pitiful in the extreme
reasoning powers, fatal to the full that after so many ages of almost development of truth, and in every unopposed indulgence, philosophers sense, inimical to the solid progress instead of beginning to seek, before of sound philosophy, everything else, the true constitution If to ascertain tae true figure and of the physical world, are still to be condition of the earth, we adopt the seen labouring only to frame hypo- Zetetic process, which truly is the theses, and to reconcile phenomena only one sufficiently reliable. We with imaginary and ever shifting shall find that instead of its being a foundation. Their labour is simply to globe-one of an infinite number of repeat and perpetuate the self dece- worlds moving on axes and in an ption of their predecessors. Surely orbit round the sun, it is the directly the day is not far distant when the contrary - a Plane without diurnal or very complications which their num- progressive motion, and unaccomerous theories have created, will star- panied by anything in firmament tle them into wakefulness, and con- analogous to itself, or in other vince then that for long ages past words, that it is the only known they have but been idly dreaming. material world.
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