CHAPTER XIII.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
"The greater the sphere of our knowledge, the larger is the surface of its contact with the infinity of our ignorance."
272. The last three chapters have contained some account of progress made in three branches of astronomy which, though they overlap and exercise an important influence on one another, are to a large extent studied by different men and by different methods, and have different aims. The difference is perhaps best realised by thinking of the work of a great master in each department, Bradley, Laplace, and Herschel. So great is the difference that Delambre in his standard history of astronomy all but ignores the work of the great school of mathematical astronomers who were his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, not from any want of appreciation of their importance, but because he regards their work as belonging rather to mathematics than to astronomy; while Bessel (§ 277), in saying that the function of astronomy is "to assign the places on the sky where sun, moon, planets, comets, and stars have been, are, and will be," excludes from its scope nearly everything towards which Herschel's energies were directed.
Current modern practice is, however, more liberal in its use of language than either Delambre or Bessel, and finds it convenient to recognise all three of the subjects or groups of subjects referred to as integral parts of one science.
The mutual relation of gravitational astronomy and what has been for convenience called observational astronomy has been already referred to (chapter x., § 196). It should, however, be noticed that the latter term has in this book hitherto been used chiefly for only one part of the astrono-
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