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 But they were superseded among peoples in the van of progress by philosophic cosmogonies at the epoch when Thales began to diffuse throughout Ionia the wisdom of the Egyptians and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.' The insubstantial fabrics reared by them were then fatally discredited by Baconian methods and the Newtonian reign of law; they survived--forms of thought die slowly--but insecurely, with noticeably undermined foundations. Swedenborg was the last eminent reactionary, and his restoration in 1734 of the Cartesian gyrating medium as the motive power of the solar machine was a palpable failure. It could not be otherwise, since its inceptive idea had grown superannuated. The modern era of scientific cosmogony was at hand. It was preceded by some remarkable attempts at sidereal generalization. Cosmology is the elder sister of cosmogony. What _is_ must be studied before what _was_ can be inferred. Precedent states remain visionary unless they can be closely linked to actual and observable conditions. Now about the middle of the eighteenth century an intelligible plan of the stellar universe, so far as the telescope had then disclosed it, began to be a desideratum. And the enterprise of supplying the need was undertaken independently by two men of obscure origin and imperfect education--one English, the other German. Thomas Wright, of Durham, was the son of a carpenter at Byer's Green, where he was born September 22, 1711. His life was one of many vicissitudes, but ended happily. Having struggled hard for a livelihood--now at sea, then again on shore as a clock and almanac maker, a teacher and lecturer--he finally attained, somewhat unaccountably, to distinction and affluence, built himself a handsome house hard by his native shanty, and prosperously and reputably inhabited it during a quarter of a century. He died February 25, 1786, just one year after Herschel had described to the Royal Society the outcome of his first experiments in 'star gauging.' As the originator of the 'cloven disc' theory of the Milky Way, Wright is still deservedly remembered, for although that majestic structure is assuredly otherwise designed, it was no mean achievement to have initiated the science of its architecture.