Omighty heroes, of loftier than mortal estate, who have discovered the law of those great divinities and released the miserable mind of man from fear; mortality dreading as it did in eclipses of the stars crimes or death of some sort . . . [as poets describe a solar eclipse], or in the dying of the moon inferring that she was poisoned and consequently coming to her aid with a noisy clattering of cymbals. . . ; all hail your genius, ye that interpret the heavens and grasp the facts of nature, discoverers of a theory whereby you have vanquished gods and men! For who beholding these truths and the regularity of the stars' periods of trouble. . . would not forgive his own destiny for the generation of mortals.

Source: John F. Healy, Natural History: A Selection (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991).