ent of
disorders has changed to meet the new conditions.
New diseases have shown themselves 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 organized 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 move
merits 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
formularized for working purposes in the language of
Ptolemy; 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 if it were connected with
the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would
deprive it of power of rotation--the relativ