It is no affected modesty which leads me to express the regret that this
interesting occasion could not have taken place under somewhat different
auspices. I feel that the duty of addressing this great and enlightened
assembly, comprising so much of the intelligence of the community and of
the science of the country, ought to have been elsewhere assigned; that
it should have devolved upon some one of the eminent persons, many of
whom I see before me, to whom you have been listening the past week,
who, as observers and geometers, could have treated the subject with a
master's power; astronomers, whose telescopes have penetrated the depths
of the heavens, or mathematicians, whose analysis unthreads the maze
of their wondrous mechanism. If, instead of commanding, as you easily
could have done, qualifications of this kind, your choice has rather
fallen on one making no pretensions to the honorable name of a man of
science,--but whose delight it has always been to turn aside from the
dusty paths of active life, for an interval of recreation in the green
fields of sacred nature in all her kingdoms,--it is, I presume, because
you have desired on an occasion of this kind, necessarily of a popular
character, that those views of the subject should be presented which
address themselves to the general intelligence of the community, and
not to its select scientific circles. There is, perhaps, no branch of
science which to the same extent as astronomy exhibits phenomena which,
while they task the highest powers of philosophical research, are also
well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured with
scientific culture, and even to teach the sensibilities of the wholly
uninstructed observer. The profound investigations of the chemist into
the ultimate constitution of material nature, the minute researches of
the physiologist into the secrets of animal life, the transcendental
logic of the geometer, clothed in a notation, the very sight of which
terrifies the uninitiated,--are lost on the common understanding. But
the unspeakable glories of the rising and the setting sun; the serene
majesty of the moon, as she walks in full-orbed brightness through the
heavens; the soft witchery of the morning and the evening star; the
imperial splendors of the firmament on a bright, unclouded night; the
comet, whose streaming banner floats over half the sky,--these are
objects which charm and astonish alike the philosopher and the peasant,
the mathematician who weighs the masses and defines the orbits of the
heavenly bodies, and the untutored observer who sees nothing beyond the
images painted upon the eye.