The dawn of astronomy

Synopsis

The enormous advance which has been recently made in our astronomical knowledge, and in our power of investigating the various bodies which people space, is to a very great extent due to the introduction of methods of work and ideas from other branches of science. Much of the recent progress has been, we may indeed say, entirely dependent upon the introduction of the methods of inquiry to which I refer. While this is generally recognised, it is often forgotten that a knowledge of even elementary astronomy may be of very great assistance to students of other branches of science; in other words, that astronomy is well able to pay her debt.

Amongst those branches is obviously that which deals with man's first attempts to grasp the meaning and phenomena of the universe in which he found himself before any scientific methods were available to him; before he had any idea of the origins or the conditionings of the things around him.

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