Can you explain why there's a parallel there and why this parallel is important?

Yes.

Glenn and I were struck by the fact that our subject matters, which seem so remote from one another-- I'm a historian of science.

My work has been first and foremost in the history of probability and statistics.

Glenn is a classicist, a Hellenist, whose work has been very wide-ranging, but primarily centered on ancient Greece.

We were quite struck that both of our disciplines had turned up parallels which wouldn't have been evident if you had just concentrated on the subject matter of these two pursuits.

So let's take the science of astronomy and philology.

Is philology gonna be more like that, so more like an art and less like an exact science, even if we call it a science?