Astronomy is the science of which the human mind may most justly boast.  It owes this indisputable preeminence to the elevated nature of its object, to the grandeur of its means of investigation, to the certainty, the utility, and the unparalleled magnificence of its results.

From the earliest period of the social existence of mankind, the study of the movements of the heavenly bodies has attracted the attention of governments and peoples.  To several great captains, illustrious statesmen, philosophers, and eminent orators of Greece and Rome it formed a subject of delight.  Yet, let us be permitted to state, astronomy truly worthy of the name is quite a modern science.  It dates only from the sixteenth century.

Three great, three brilliant phases, have marked its progress.

In 1543 Copernicus overthrew with a firm and bold hand, the greater part of the antique and venerable scaffolding with which the illusions of the senses and the pride of successive generations had filled the universe.  The earth ceased to be the centre, the pivot of the celestial movements; it henceforward modestly ranged itself among the planets; its material importance, amid the totality of the bodies of which our solar system is composed, found itself reduced almost to that of a grain of sand.

Twenty-eight years had elapsed from the day when the Canon of Thorn expired while holding in his faltering hands the first copy of the work which was to diffuse so bright and pure a flood of glory upon Poland, when Wuertemberg witnessed the birth of a man who was destined to achieve a revolution in science not less fertile in consequences, and still more difficult of execution.  This man was Kepler.  Endowed with two qualities which seemed incompatible with each other, a volcanic imagination, and a pertinacity of intellect which the most tedious numerical calculations could not daunt, Kepler conjectured that the movements of the celestial bodies must be connected together by simple laws, or, to use his own expressions, by harmonic laws.  These laws he undertook to discover.  A thousand fruitless attempts, errors of calculation inseparable from a colossal undertaking, did not prevent him a single instant from advancing resolutely towards the goal of which he imagined he had obtained a glimpse.  Twenty-two years were employed by him in this investigation, and still he was not weary of it!  What, in reality, are twenty-two years of labour to him who is about to become the legislator of worlds; who shall inscribe his name in ineffaceable characters upon the frontispiece of an immortal code; who shall be able to exclaim in dithyrambic language, and without incurring the reproach of any one, “The die is cast; I have written my book; it will be read either in the present age or by posterity, it matters not which; it may well await a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an interpreter of his works?"[23]