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Agnes M. Clerke
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Its vogue had, nevertheless, been brilliant and sustained. Advanced thinkers in the time of Louis Quatorze piqued themselves upon being Cartesians. The vortical hypothesis was novel—it seemed daring; and though it might not be true, it had plausibility enough for fashionable currency. Nor did it deserve the unmitigated contempt with which it was treated by Delambre. A glance at the skies makes us pause before condemning it to scornful oblivion. Just two centuries after its promulgation the first spiral nebula was identified in Canes Venatici. That the heavens swarm with analogous objects is certain, and their status as partially developed systems is visible in every line of their conformation. Our own planetary world may, or may not, have traversed the stage they so copiously illustrate; but in any case they prove beyond question that vortices variously conditioned are prevalent among the forms assumed by cosmic masses advancing towards an orderly arrangement.
Mystical cosmogonies belong to the period of ethnic infancy. They have not ceased to be current. World-fables must be invented wherever the obscure wonder of savage communities is excited by the mysterious spectacle of Nature's apparently designed operations and irresistible power. But they were superseded among peoples in the van of progress by philosophic cosmogonies at the epoch when Thales began to diffuse throughout Ionia the wisdom of the Egyptians and Chaldeans. Schemes, however, such as he and his successors elaborated result from the discourse of reason unfettered by any close attention to facts. They have been mostly wrought out by men who, in Delambre's words, 'Dissertaient à perte de vue, sans jamais rien observer, et sans jamais rien calculer.'
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