But how was it that in those rude days, with small
knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than flat walls
and dial-plates, those first astronomers made progress so considerable?
Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were observing recurred,
for the most part, within moderate intervals; so that they could
collect large experience within the compass of their natural lives;
because days and months and years were measurable periods, and within
them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated themselves.
But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
of order at all?
We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
observations.
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