They have produced historians, and poets, and criticks, and painters, of the first class, and these, not as the authors of the Universal History assert, like grapes in Siberia and contrary to the usual course of nature,' but in numbers, which, when considered in reference to the size and population of the country, are not exceeded by any other nation. A respectable periodical work has indeed pronounced of them, that the Muses seem ever to have chosen the Netherlands for their favourite retreat.'* And though this may be saying too much, we are persuaded that in the walks of genius and taste, their claims are far from inconsiderable. Their language, it is true, is harsh and dissonant. We are assured, however, by those, who understand all its varieties, that the work, we have been reviewing, is an eminent proof, how much a skilful writer may do, by attention in the choice and arrangement of his words, towards remedying this evil. Their native literature has, no doubt, greatly suffered from the habit, which their scholars have had, of writing in the Latin language, to the neglect of their own.

We could willingly enlarge upon these subjects; but we are afraid of having already passed our proper limits. We shall, therefore, leave for the present the literary pretensions of the Dutch, and close with quoting the encomium bestowed on them by their most distinguished countryman, to a part of which, at least, we hope this view of their history may have proved them to be entitled.

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Thus,' says De Witt in his Interests of Holland, are diligence, vigilance, valour and frugality, not only natural to the Hollanders themselves, but by the nature of their country, are communicated to all foreigners, who inhabit amongst them.'

J. Farrar.

ART. VII. Ferguson's Astronomy, explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's principles, with notes, and supplementary chapters. By David Brewster, LL. D. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Philadelphia, A. Small, 1817. 2 vols. 8vo. with a 4to vol. of plates.

It is now about seventy years since this work first appeared, and it has, we believe, received no material alteration

* Il semble que les Muses l'ont toujours choisi pour asile.' Hist. des Ouvrages des Savans, 1687.

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since the edition of 1770, this being the last that was revised by the author. It has passed through ten editions in England and two in this country. It would be difficult to name a book on Astronomy that has had so extensive a circulation. Its chief merit is plainness and perspicuity. It requires little or no preparatory study, and seldom reminds the reader how many things there are already known, which he is not permitted to see, and how many yet remain to be discovered. The author indeed is strictly popular not only in his language and style, but in his choice of topicks, in his resources, and in the general character and furniture of his mind. He was a man of little intellectual cultivation, and no enlarged views of the subjects on which he wrote. He was principally distinguished for his mechanical ingenuity, by which he contrived to illustrate some of the leading phenomena of the planetary system. He made the best use of orreries and planetariums, which owe much of the little value they possess to his invention and skill. These artifices are very proper in the first stages of instruction, or where there are no other means of access to the mind of the learner. They are to the more refined methods what hieroglyphicks are to alphabetical writing. The facts which they teach, are accompanied with a thousand errours and gross conceptions. Wheels and pinions give but a poor idea of the simple, harmonious operations of gravity, that powerful all-pervading energy, by which the celestial fabrick is connected and sustained. A mechanical pano

rama may represent some of the more prominent features of a city or of a battle; but there are other phenomena, which it does not exhibit, less obvious indeed, but of a deeper interest, on which these depend; of which we have some traces in the works of the painter and statuary.

Ferguson professes to teach astronomy upon Sir Isaac New-. ton's principles, and one learns from him about as much of the Principia, as he learns of the Iliad by reading the arguments prefixed to the several books, or of a play of Shakspeare, by reading the story on which it is founded. He undertakes to teach a science, which owes all the refinement and perfection to which it has attained to mathematicks, without any considerable aid from this subsidiary branch of knowledge. It is principally owing to this circumstance, we think, that the book has been so long and so much used. The reader is gratified at being able to go through a work of such high pretensions, without meeting any thing that he does not under

stand, and without suspecting, that he has not advanced far enough to discover where the difficulties are, or in what they consist.

We confess we were surprised at seeing another impression of this work, edited by Dr. Brewster. We thought we had made some advances, not only in the more abstruse and difficult parts of the science, but also in the methods of simplifying it, and rendering it intelligible and interesting to common readers. Are all the researches, the improvements, and the speculations of the last half century, by which this science has been extended and illustrated, so entirely lost to the world at large? Are these lights destined to remain forever in the horizon, to gild only here and there a summit, which lifts itself above the general level?

It is time to present Astronomy, not only to the senses and the memory, but to the understanding and imagination, to exhibit it not merely as a collection of facts, phenomena, and tables, but as a delineation of the progress of the human mind. It is no longer to be regarded as the science of almanack making merely, as furnishing rules to the mariner, the geographer, and chronologist, but as a history of human efforts, speculations and inventions.

In the phenomena of the heavens we see a great problem held up as a sort of challenge to every nation of every age. It has called forth the greatest talents. It is the subject, on which the understanding has been exercised with the most brilliant success, and in which we trace the development and perfection of some of its noblest powers. It affords a scale on which we compare the genius, the skill, and the attainments of different nations and of different periods; and what is not the smallest recommendation to Europeans and the descendants of Europeans, it furnishes the most indubitable proofs of our intellectual superiority over all other people who have cultivated this science.

The philosophers of ancient times applied themselves to the study of the heavens, with the most laudable zeal and perseverance. We trace some of their earliest and rudest efforts, and their fantastical taste, in the constellations, the oldest monuments of human ingenuity, monuments which have remained undisturbed by the revolution of states, and untarnished by time.

We delight to look down upon the Newtons and Herschels of former times, struggling with difficulties, which no longer

exist, and feeling their way as it were in the dark, among objects, which to us appear in broad day light.

The ancient astronomers, however, made some important discoveries; they advanced several steps toward disentangling this mighty maze. But they left the work incomplete ; nay more, they committed some great mistakes, and came finally to a conclusion, that was radically false.

Soon after the introduction of Astronomy into Europe, it assumed a new form. In the course of one or two centuries, it is enriched with more discoveries than all that had been made before. The heavens become quite another spectacle, not only to the understanding, but to the senses. New worlds burst upon the sight, and old ones expand to a thousand times their former dimensions; those little stars that twinkle over our heads, become immense globes, with land and water, mountains and vallies, encompassed by atmospheres, enlightened by moons, and diversified by day and night and summer and winter. Beyond these are other suns, giving light and life to other systems, not a thousand or two thousand merely, but more than can be numbered; the imagination is bewildered and lost in the attempt to explore and fathom them. All space seems to be illuminated, and every particle of light a world. When we look for our sun, with its attendant planets, amid those regions of brightness, it is scarcely to be discerned. Its extinction would make no perceptible void. How small then this little speck, the earth, and how much smaller we who inhabit it. But we are more than consoled for this insignificance of our corporeal extension, by the enlargement, and elevation and dignity of the sphere of the mind.

Not only have modern discoveries extended our view of the heavens. They have unfolded the order and relation of the several parts to each; instead of making the earth the central and most important part of the system, we have given this place to the sun, which is to the earth as a mountain to a pebble, and restored the earth to the class of planets, to which it is so nearly allied by its opacity, its form, its annual and diurnal motions. We have also annihilated all that cumbrous and complicated machinery, which the ancients supposed necessary to support the planets and to carry them round in their orbits. These bodies are now upheld without any scaffolding of our contriving; they are borne along self-supported, without noise, without interference, and without errour, and all this by

a power the most familiar to every one, and according to a law the most simple and the most perfectly adapted to the order and perpetuity of the whole system.

In the mean time the Eastern nations have been engaged by methods and instruments of their own invention in solving this same problem. Indeed they had made considerable progress in it long before it was thought of in Europe. Their tables refer to an epoch more than three thousand years before the christian era, and it is thought by some, who are competent judges, that they had a highly improved astronomy at this early period. We have but lately learned, that what we give Copernicus and Kepler and others the credit of discovering was well known before to our brethren of the East, and we owe the very knowledge of these facts to our attainments in astronomy, and the consequent improvement of navigation and the extension of commerce. We had been admiring the same phenomena, had been perplexed with the same difficulties, our eyes had been directed to the same stars, and our thoughts to the same contemplations and the same results, without any communication with each other. We now welcome them with the more cordiality on account of our common labours, and we learn with pride that though younger scholars in the same school, we have have far outstripped them. Our researches have gone more deeply and thoroughly into the subject. Our knowledge is in every respect more precise and more extensive. We have not transported ourselves to the other planets, but we have, as it were, brought the other planets to us; we have been able to view them as we view a distant mountain, or a balloon in our atmosphere. By the invention of the telescope we have acquired a power that is like a new sense,-a sense, by which space is annihilated and remote invisible bodies are brought before us and subjected to our inspection. We claim also a high distinction on account of our instruments for measuring time and determining with exactness the positions of the heavenly bodies. But our greatest boast is the invention of the calculus, and the application of it to the mechanical phenomena of the heavens.

This not only brings before us the geometrical forms and dimensions and phases and inequalities of surface of the heavenly bodies, but it reveals the secret cause of their motions; it unlocks this grand orrery, and exposes all the curious and wonderful mechanism, by which the parts are connected and Vol. VII. No. 2.

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