Mathematics in the Quest for the Unknown. victim of blind superstition. Dissatisfied at length with this barren credulity, he launched forth on the cold and sboreless sea of ungrounded speculation. Here he became more bewildered than . before, and wandered even farther from the pathway to truth. Little wonder that his progress was so slow and uncer tain when all creation appeared to him as a Tangled web of no man's weaving, With end obscured and piu•pose hidden All his efforts toward the unravelling of the mystic web were fruitless until he discovered that It was woven by a master weaver, Every strand fixed in its place. Each its ordered end fulfilling With perfect symmetry and grace Man beheld his first great mystery in the boundless realms of space. "He turned to the heavens and gazed in solemn wonder, charmed with its shining host, moving in grand procession !through the hallways of the sky, each star as it rose and set marking time on the records of nature.' " Earnestly did he long for a solution of this mighty problem. At last he found it. Mathematics offered her assistance and the mystery vanished like a fog before the rays of a noonday sun. "With the proper ties of the ellipse, the laws of motion demonstrated by mathe matics and two facts drawn from observation, the one that bodies fall towards the earth, and the other the regular motion of the planets, he demonstrates beyond the power of refutation the laws of the celestial system. He traces star after star, however eccentric their courses through the unseen immensity of space, and calculates with unfailing certainty the hour of its return after ages have passed away. He does more. He weighs matter in the balances of creation and finds that to complete the harmony of the system a planet is wanting in some distant corner of its wide domain. No mortal eye has ever seen it. No tradition tells
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