Читать книгу Modern cosmogonies онлайн

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It was preceded by some remarkable attempts at sidereal generalization. Cosmology is the elder sister of cosmogony. What is must be studied before what was can be inferred. Precedent states remain visionary unless they can be closely linked to actual and observable conditions. Now about the middle of the eighteenth century an intelligible plan of the stellar universe, so far as the telescope had then disclosed it, began to be a desideratum. And the enterprise of supplying the need was undertaken independently by two men of obscure origin and imperfect education—one English, the other German.

Thomas Wright, of Durham, was the son of a carpenter at Byer's Green, where he was born September 22, 1711. His life was one of many vicissitudes, but ended happily. Having struggled hard for a livelihood—now at sea, then again on shore as a clock and almanac maker, a teacher and lecturer—he finally attained, somewhat unaccountably, to distinction and affluence, built himself a handsome house hard by his native shanty, and prosperously and reputably inhabited it during a quarter of a century. He died February 25, 1786, just one year after Herschel had described to the Royal Society the outcome of his first experiments in 'star gauging.' As the originator of the 'cloven disc' theory of the Milky Way, Wright is still deservedly remembered, for although that majestic structure is assuredly otherwise designed, it was no mean achievement to have initiated the science of its architecture.