A like instance of anticipation is afforded in the beautiful experiment
of the freely-suspended ball revolving in an ellipse under the combined
influence of the central and tangential forces, which Jeremiah Horrocks
devised, when pursuing Kepler's theory of planetary motion,--his
intuition being, that the motions of the spheres might be represented
by terrestrial movements. We may mention the observation which the
ill-starred Horrocks makes, in a letter,[1] on the occasion of this
experiment, as one of the sublimities of Science:--"It appears to me,
however, that I have fallen upon the true theory, and that it admits of
being illustrated by natural movements on the surface of the earth; for
Nature everywhere acts according to a uniform plan, and the harmony of
creation is such that small things constitute a faithful type of
greater things." Another instance is afforded in the grand intuition of
Oken, who, when rambling in the Hartz Mountains, lit upon the skull of
a deer, and saw that the cranium was but an expansion of vertebrae, and
that the vertebra is the theoretical archetype of the entire osseous
framework,--the foundation of modern Osteology. And still another is
the well-known instance of the change in polarization predicted by
Fresnel from the mere interpretation of an algebraic symbol.
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