arts, arisen from one of the investigations which M. Comte most unequivocally condemns as idle, the research into the internal constitution of the sun?  How few, moreover, of the discoveries which have changed the face of the world, either were or could have been arrived at by investigations aiming directly at the object!  Would the mariner’s compass ever have been found by direct efforts for the improvement of navigation?  Should we have reached the electric telegraph by any amount of striving for a means of instantaneous communication, if Franklin had not identified electricity with lightning, and Ampere with magnetism?  The most apparently insignificant archaeological or geological fact, is often found to throw a light on human history, which M. Comte, the basis of whose social philosophy is history, should be the last person to disparage.  The direction of the entrance to the three great Pyramids of Ghizeh, by showing the position of the circumpolar stars at the time when they were built, is the best evidence we even now have of the immense antiquity of Egyptian civilization.[24] The one point on which M. Comte’s doctrine has some colour of reason, is the case of sidereal astronomy:  so little knowledge of it being really accessible to us, and the connexion of that little with any terrestrial interests being, according to all our means of judgment, infinitesimal.  It is certainly difficult to imagine how any considerable benefit to humanity can be derived from a knowledge of the motions of the double stars:  should these ever become important to us it will be in so prodigiously remote an age, that we can afford to remain ignorant of them until, at least, all our moral, political, and social difficulties have been settled.  Yet the discovery that gravitation extends even to those remote regions, gives some additional strength to the conviction of the universality of natural laws; and the habitual meditation on such vast objects and distances is not without an aesthetic usefulness, by kindling and exalting the imagination, the worth of which in itself, and even its re-action on the intellect, M. Comte is quite capable of appreciating.  He would reply, however, that there are better means of accomplishing these purposes.  In the same spirit he condemns the study even of the solar system, when extended to any planets but those which are visible to the naked eye, and which alone exert an appreciable gravitative influence on the earth.  Even the perturbations he thinks it idle to study, beyond a mere general conception of them, and thinks that astronomy may well limit its domain to the motions and mutual action of the earth, sun, and moon.  He looks for a similar expurgation of all the other sciences.  In one passage he expressly says that the greater part of the researches which are really accessible to us are idle and useless.  He would pare down the dimensions of all the sciences as narrowly as possible.  He is continually repeating that no science, as an abstract study, should be carried further