“All secrets of the deep, all Nature’s works,
      Or works of God in heaven, or air, or sea.”

And yet, thou stricken observer of the heavenly bodies! hadst thou but known what marvels would be revealed by the power of thy wondrous instrument after thou should’st be laid lifeless and cold beneath the marble floor of Sante Croce, at the age of seventy-eight, without a monument, without even the right of burial in consecrated ground, having died a prisoner of the Inquisition, yet not without having rendered to astronomical science services of utmost value,—­even thou might have died rejoicing, as one of the great benefactors of the world.  And thy discoveries shall be forever held in gratitude; they shall herald others of even greater importance.  Newton shall prove that the different planets are attracted to the sun in the inverse ratio of the squares of their distances; that the earth has a force on the moon identical with the force of gravity, and that all celestial bodies, to the utmost boundaries of space, mutually attract each other; that all particles of matter are governed by the same law,—­the great law of gravitation, by which “astronomy,” in the language of Whewell, “passed from boyhood to manhood, and by which law the great discoverer added more to the realm of science than any man before or since his day.”  And after Newton shall pass away, honored and lamented, and be buried with almost royal pomp in the vaults of Westminster, Halley and other mathematicians shall construct lunar tables, by which longitude shall be accurately measured on the pathless ocean.  Lagrange and Laplace shall apply the Newtonian theory to determine the secular inequalities of celestial motion; they shall weigh absolutely the amount of matter in the planets; they shall show how far their orbits deviate from circles; and they shall enumerate the cycles of changes detected in the circuit of the moon.  Clairaut shall remove the perplexity occasioned by the seeming discrepancy between the observed and computed motions of the moon’s perigee.  Halley shall demonstrate the importance of observations of the transit of Venus as the only certain way of obtaining the sun’s parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth; he shall predict the return of that mysterious body which we call a comet.  Herschel shall construct a telescope which magnifies two thousand times, and add another planet to our system beyond the mighty orb of Saturn.  Roemer shall estimate the velocity of light from the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites.  Bessell shall pass the impassable gulf of space and measure the distance of some of the fixed stars, although such is the immeasurable space between the earth and those distant suns that the parallax of only about thirty has yet been discovered with our finest instruments,—­so boundless is the material universe, so vast are the distances, that light, travelling one hundred and sixty thousand miles with every pulsation of the blood, will not reach us from some of those remote worlds in one hundred thousand years.  So marvellous shall be the victories of science, that the perturbations of the planets in their courses shall reveal the existence of a new one more distant than Uranus, and Leverrier shall tell at what part of the heavens that star shall first be seen.