As fresh and vivid descriptions of natural scenes and objects are suited to enhance a love for the study of nature, so also is landscape painting. Both shew to us the external world in all its rich variety of forms, and both are capable, in various degrees, according as they are more or less happily conceived, of linking together the outward and the inward world. It is the tendency to form such links which marks the last and highest aim of representative art; but the scientific object to which these pages are devoted, restricts them to a different point of view; and landscape painting can be here considered only as it brings before us the characteristic physiognomy of different positions of the earth's surface, as it increases the longing desire for distant voyages, and as, in a manner equally instructive and agreeable, it incites to fuller intercourse with nature in her freedom.

In classical antiquity, from the peculiar direction of the Greek and Roman mind, landscape painting, like the poetic description of scenery, could scarcely become an independent object of art: both were used only as auxiliaries. Employed in complete subordination to other objects, landscape painting long served merely as a background to historical composition, or as an accidental ornament in the decoration of painted walls.

The fifteenth century belongs to those rare epochs in the history of the world, in which all the efforts of the human mind are invested with a determinate and common character, and manifest an unswerving direction towards a single object. The unity of these endeavours, the success with which they were crowned, and the vigour and activity displayed by entire nations, give grandeur and enduring splendour to the age of Columbus, of Sebastian Cabot, and of Vasco de Gama. Intervening between two different stages of cultivation, the fifteenth century forms a transition epoch belonging at once to the middle ages and to the commencement of modern times. It is the epoch of the greatest discoveries in geographical space, comprising almost all degrees of latitude, and almost every gradation of elevation of the earth's surface. To the inhabitants of Europe it doubled the works of Creation, while at the same time it offered to the intellect new and powerful incitements to the improvement of the natural sciences in their physical and mathematical departments.

The world of objects, now as in Alexander's campaigns but with yet more preponderating power, presented to the combining mind the separate forms of sensible objects, and the concurrent action of animating powers or forces.

Principal epochs of the progressive development and extension of the idea of the Cosmos as an organic whole.

The history of the physical contemplation of the universe is the history of the recognition of nature as a whole; it is the recital of the endeavours of man to conceive and comprehend the concurrent action of natural forces on the earth and in the regions of space: it accordingly marks the epochs of progress in the generalisation of physical views. It is that part of the history of our world of thought which relates to objects perceived by the senses, to the form of conglomerated matter, and to the forces by which it is pervaded.

In the first portion of this work, in the section on the limitation and scientific treatment of a physical description of the universe, I have endeavoured to point out the true relation which the separate branches of natural knowledge bear to that description, and to shew that the science of the Cosmos derives from those separate studies only the materials for its scientific foundation. The history of the recognition or knowledge of the universe as a whole,—of which history I now propose to present the leading ideas, and which, for the sake of brevity, I here term sometimes the “history of the Cosmos,” and sometimes the “history of the physical contemplation of the universe,”—must not, therefore, be confounded with the “history of the natural sciences,” as it is given in several of our best elementary books of physics, or in those of the morphology of plants and animals.