s in the history of every one of
them, which we may call the _Empirical_, the _Classificatory_, and the
_Theoretical_. However humiliating it may sound, every one of our
sciences, however grand their present titles, can be traced back to the
most humble and homely occupations of half-savage tribes. It was not the
true, the good, and the beautiful which spurred the early philosophers to
deep researches and bold discoveries. The foundation-stone of the most
glorious structures of human ingenuity in ages to come was supplied by the
pressing wants of a patriarchal and semi-barbarous society. The names of
some of the most ancient departments of human knowledge tell their own
tale. Geometry, which at present declares itself free from all sensuous
impressions, and treats of its points and lines and planes as purely ideal
conceptions, not to be confounded with those coarse and imperfect
representations as they appear on paper to the human eye; geometry, as its
very name declares, began with measuring a garden or a field. It is
derived from the Greek _ge_, land, ground, earth, and _metron_, measure.
Botany, the science of plants, was originally the science of _botane_,
which in Greek does not mean a plant in general, but fodder, from
_boskein_, to feed. The science of plants would have been called
Phytology, from the Greek _phyton_, a plant.(1) The founders of Astronomy
were not the poet or the philosopher, but the sailor and the farmer. The
early poet may have admired "the mazy dance of planets," and the
philosopher may have speculated on the heavenly harmonies; but it was to
the sailor alone that a knowledge of the glittering guides of heaven
became a question of life and death. It was he who calculated their
risings and settings with the accuracy of a merchant and the shrewdness of
an adventurer; and the names that were given to single stars or
constellations clearly show that they were invented by the ploughers of
the sea and of the land. The moon, for instance, the golden hand on the
dark dial of heaven, was called by them the Measurer,--the measurer of
time; for time was measured by nights, and moons, and winters, long before
it was reckoned by days, and suns, and years. Moon(2) is a very old word.
It was _mona_ in Anglo-Saxon, and was used there, not as a feminine, but
as a masculine; for the moon was a masculine in all Teutonic languages,
and it is only through the influence of classical models that in English
moon has bee