Limitations of Astronomy
These limitations are great. Ages before the existence of scientific astronomy, the question was put to the patriarch Job, “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion; canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?” And when Job in his heart, if not with his lips, answered the Almighty, No, he answered for all his successors as well as for himself. Astronomical problems accumulate unsolved on our hands, because we cannot, as mechanicians, chemists, or physiologists, experiment upon the stars. Are they built of the same materials as our planet? Are they inhabited? Are Saturn’s rings solid or liquid? Has the moon an atmosphere? Are the atmospheres of the planets like ours? Are the light and heat of the sun begotten of combustion? and what is the fuel which feeds his unquenchable fires? These are but a few of the questions which we ask, and variously answer, but leave in reality unanswered, after all. A war of words regarding the revolution of the moon round her axis may go on to the end of time, because we cannot throw our satellite out of gearing, or bring her to a momentary stand-still; and the problem of the habitability of the stars awaits in vain an experimentum crucis.
The astronomer, accordingly, must be content to be the chronicler of a spectacle, in which, except as an on-looker, he takes no part. Like the sailor at the mast-head in his solitary night-watch, he must see, as he sails through space in his small earthly bark, that nothing escapes his view within the vast visible firmament. But he stands, as it were, with folded arms, occupied solely in wistfully gazing over the illimitable ocean, where the nearest vessel, like his own, is far beyond summons or signal, and the greatest appears but as a speck on the distant horizon. His course lies out of the track of every other vessel; and year after year he repeats the same voyage, without ever practically altering his relation to the innumerable fleets which navigate those seas.—Professor George Wilson, on the Physical Sciences, &c.