the planets from the sun, and the magnitude of the heavenly bodies. No person now living ever saw the transit, nor will any of the present inhabitants of the earth, who see the wonderful visions of 1874 and 1852, ever behold them again.
The transits of Venus occur alternately at intervals of eight, one hundred and five and a half, and one hundred and twenty-one and a half years. The last transit took place in 1769,[1] before the American Republic had an existence, the next will occur in 1874, and the last that we shall ever see, in 1852. Nearly a century and a quarter will then pass away, to that strange-looking date 2004, ere the beautiful planet will impart her revelation to the astronomer on the sun's reflected image.
About the year 1635 there might have been found, in an obscure village near Liverpool, a young enthusiast of science, who, like Ferguson, turned away from the ordinary pastimes of youth to study the sublimities of the celestial scenery. He was beloved by all for his amiable disposition and his stainless life. Before he reached the age of eighteen he had mastered all the known problems of astronomical knowledge.
His name was Jeremiah Horrox. His father was a man of moderate means, but sympathized with his son's studious turn of mind, and, before the year 1633, placed him at Emanuel College, Cambridge.
The stormy times of the English Revolution were approaching. During the period in which the court and Parliament were occupied in the disputes that lost the first Charles his throne, four men (three of them were youths, and all of them intimately acquainted with each other) were employed in advancing the theory and practice of astronomy. They were, William Wilbon, William Gascoygne, James Crabtree, and Jeremiah Horrox, the subject of this sketch.
Possessing a sensitive, responsive nature, and always happier in loving companionship, the boy-astronomer Horrox made of James Crabtree, a youth in years but a sage in knowledge, a bosom-friend.
Horrox had but scarcely passed into his teens, before he became interested in the fact that the tables of Kepler indicated the near approach of the transit of Venus across the disk of the sun. It was a sight that no human eye had ever seen, and one which, if any human
- ↑ The year 1769, the birth-year of Humboldt, Cuvier, and Napoleon, is marked in the calendar of science by unusual achievements in the infant branches of experimental investigation. Chemistry had emerged from the mystical stage of alchemy, and was planted upon its firm inductive basis. Bergmann had just made the first analysis ever made of mineral waters. Black, Cavendish, and Priestley, had commenced investigations into the nature of different kinds of air; and, in 1769, Scheele first discovered the existence of phosphate of lime in bones. The experiments of Bakewell in sheep-breeding, the first step in the art of improving stock, which has been carried to such perfection during the last hundred years, also date their success from 1739.—Ed.
