However, Hipparchus, who lived between one hundred and twenty-five and one hundred and sixty years before the Christian era, and whom Mr. Vince styles “the Father of Astronomy,” was the first person that cultivated every part of that science. His discoveries, together with those of Ptolemy, are preserved in the Μεγαλη Σύνταξις, or _Great Construction_,—Ptolemy’s celebrated work on Astronomy, named by the Arabs the _Almagest_, and now usually so called. Footnote 17: This great philosopher of antiquity, so justly entitled to celebrity for his mathematical works, flourished three hundred years before the Christian era. Care should be taken not to confound him with Euclid of Megara, who lived a century earlier. The latter, as the Abbé Barthelemi observes, being too much familiarized with the writings of Parmenides and the Elean school, had recourse to abstractions; “a method,” says the Abbé, “often dangerous, oftener unintelligible.” Just after, he adds: “The subtleties of metaphysics calling to their aid the quirks of logic, _words_ presently took place of _things_, and students acquired nothing in the schools but a spirit of acrimony and contradiction.” _Travels of the younger Anacharsis_, vol. iii. chap. 37. Footnote 18: That the sun is at rest, and that the planets revolve round him, is an opinion that appears to have been received of old, by Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, and the whole sect of the Pythagoreans. It is probable, as Mr. Rowning[18a] observes, that this notion was derived from them, by the Greeks: But the opinion that the sun stood still in the centre, while the whole heavens moved around it, was the prevailing one, until Copernicus, by the establishment of his system, restored the ancient astronomy of the Pythagorean school. Footnote 18a: In his _Compendious System of Natural Philosophy_. ----- But after the appearance of Copernicus,[19] succeeded by the ingenious Tycho Brahe[20] and sagacious Kepler,[21] arose the learned physiologist Bacon, Viscount of St. Albans,—one of the most illustrious contributors to the yet scanty stock of experimental philosophy.[22] And soon after, in the same age and nation, was manifested to the world, in the full glory of meridian splendour, that great luminary of natural science, who first enlightened mankind by diffusing among them the rays of well-ascertained truths; clearly exhibiting to all, those fundamental principles of the laws of nature, by which the grand, the stupendous system of the material universe is both sustained and governed:— “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night; God said, Let NEWTON be,—and all was Light.” Finally, it was reserved for our own age and country to derive dignity and fame, from having given birth to an illustrious successor and disciple of that immortal man, in the person of the yet recently-departed RITTENHOUSE. ----- Footnote 19: