Astrognosy

It is curious at least, that his Philosophy obliged Pythagoras, to make the Solar System #61;10, tho' his imperfect Astrognosy reduced him to the shift of including the moon, and imagining an Antiχθων ["anti-earth, anti-world"] and taking the whole as a completory Unit—Sun, Mer[cury,] Ven[us,] Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Antichthon #61;9#43; Solar Syst[em] #61;1#61;10

One of the best works on astrognosy, in the present state of this science, is [Johann Elert] Bode's Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels, 9th ed. Berlin, 1823, with plates (Guide to the Knowledge of the Starry Heavens). On the subject of the constellations, and astrognosy of the ancients, the same author has written, in his Ptolemæus, Beobachtung und Beschreibung de Gestirne, Berlin, 1795 (Ptolemy, Observation and Description of the Stars).

The uranological, when opposed to the telluric domain of the Cosmos, may be conveniently separated into two divisions, one of which comprises astrognosy, or the region of the fixed stars, and the other our solar and planetary system.

Furthermore, it is to the Chaldean astrolatry that modern astrognosy owes its progress, and it is the astronomical calculations of the Magi that became the ground-work of our present mathematical astronomy and have guided discoverers in their researches.

In this balance sheet, "cosmos" and "universe" are no longer simple oppositions to one another but rather connected to one another through a complex economy of compensation: the form a system or a partnership, perhaps even a kind of "friendship." […] In this system, [Alexander von] Humboldt's Cosmos becomes the figure of a large project that places the astrognosy of the universe in the service of terrestrial responsibilities.