When we have made any progress in our investigation of the nature of science, to attempt to drive us back to the wearisome discussion of such elementary points as these, is to make progress hopeless. II. _Induction or Description?_--15. In the cases hitherto noticed, Mr. Mill extends the term _Induction_, as I think, too widely, and applies it to cases to which it is not rightly applicable. I have now to notice a case of an opposite kind, in which he does not apply it where I do, and condemns me for using it in such a case. I had spoken of Kepler's discovery of the Law, that the planets move round the sun in ellipses, as an example of Induction. The separate facts of any planet (Mars, for instance,) being in certain places at certain times, are all included in the general proposition which Kepler discovered, that Mars describes an ellipse of a certain form and position. This appears to me a very simple but a very distinct example of the operation of discovering general propositions; general, that is, with reference to particular facts; which operation Mr. Mill, as well as myself, says is Induction. But Mr. Mill denies this operation in this case to be Induction at all (i. 357). I should not have been prepared for this denial by the previous parts of Mr. Mill's book, for he had said just before (i. 350), "such facts as the magnitudes of the bodies of the solar system, their distances from each other, the figure of the earth and its rotation ... are proved indirectly, by the aid of inductions founded on other facts which we can more easily reach." If the figure of the earth and its rotation are proved by Induction, it seems very strange, and is to me quite incomprehensible, how the figure of the earth's orbit and its revolution (and of course, of the figure of Mars's orbit and his revolution in like manner,) are not also proved by Induction. No, says Mr. Mill, Kepler, in putting together a number of places of the planet into one figure, only performed an act of _description_. "This descriptive operation," he adds (i. 359), "Mr. Whewell, by an aptly chosen expression, has termed Colligation of Facts." He goes on to commend my observations concerning this process, but says that, according to the old and received meaning of the term, it is not Induction at all.