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Celestial Empires. 



BY 



REV. E. F/BURR, D. D., 

AUTHOR OF " ECCE CCELUM," " AD FIDEM," " PATER MUNDI," 
" TEMPTED TO UNBELIEF," ETC. 



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AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 

150 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORJC 



COPYRIGHT, x88s> 
BY AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 



PREFACE. 

4 

Sir Isaac Newton inserted a religious scholi- 
um in the heart of his u Principia. n 

Ivouis Agassis, on opening a session in Biol- 
ogy on the island of Penikese, said to his class, 
" Young gentlemen, before we commence to look 
into the secrets of nature let us seek wisdom from 
nature's God. Let us pray." 

The most eloquent expounder of science in 
this country during the last generation wrote at 
the close of his long and brilliant professional 
career, "I can truly declare that in the study and 
exhibitions of science to my pupils and fellow- 
men I have never forgotten to give all honor and 
glory to the infinite Creator — happy if I might 
be the honored interpreter of a portion of his 
works and of the beautiful structure and benefi- 
cent laws discovered therein by the labors of 
many illustrious predecessors. For this I claim 
no credit. It is the result to which right reason 
and sound philosophy, as well as religion, would 
naturally lead." 

Was such a " mixing up" of religion with 



PREFACE. 

science in good taste? Was it scientific? Some 
say, .No, and say it loudly. ' 4 The two things differ 
so widely in their natures. They belong to such 
different realms. They aim at such different 
objects. They pursue their objects by such dif- 
ferent roads. Who has not heard of the 'scien- 
tific method,' and who does not know that it 
differs by whole diameters from the method of 
faith ? L,et the two poles keep apart. It will be 
for the comfort and advantage of both." 

It will be seen from the following pages that 
the author does not side with these critics. He 
prefers to side with the Pleiades. To his think- 
ing there is a wise way of mixing up religion 
with everything. He is far from being stum- 
bled at seeing Resurgam at the head of a cem- 
etery, or, In the name of god, Amen ! at the 
head of a last will and testament. He is any- 
thing but disgusted to find that the name of God 
appears in some national Magna Charta, that 
the Gladstones and Bismarcks of the day speak it 
reverently in Parliament and Reichstag, that leg- 
islatures are opened with prayer, that magistrates 
and even voters are qualified by oaths, that fasts 
and thanksgivings are proclaimed in state papers, 
that the legend of a certain Commonwealth is 
Qui trans tulit stistinet, that the queen (God bless 
her !) sends forth her manifestoes with We Victoria 



PREFACE. 

by the grace of God, that autocrat Nebuchadnezzar 
in an imperial ukase " talks like a minister" to 
all his nations and languages. Even the brist- 
ling fortress of the Newtonian mathematics seems 
to him all the better for having in it a little chapel 
to the Creator; and Te Deums sound not unmusi- 
cally amid the polyglot of geologic hammers, chem- 
ical reagents, and rotating astronomical domes. 
So he hopes that Newton, Agassis and Miller 
will have many successors. It would not much 
displease him were the time hastily to come when 
not a scientific lecture is spoken nor a scientific 
book written which does not in some w T ay pay an 
emphatic tribute to the Great Author of nature. 

The tribute is due. Society needs it more 
than tongue can tell. Ours are not the ages of 
faith. An audacious speculation, w r ith its guess- 
es and fictions and insanities, is trying as never 
before to turn God out of his own world — and 
with a frightful measure of success. "What 
France lacks to-day is, not a man, but a God." 
And Germany is, if possible, worse off still. And 
both Teuton and Gaul, invited by worse vandals 
of our own, are freely crossing channel and ocean 
to lay waste the English-speaking peoples. Many 
of our strongholds have already fallen into the 
hands of the invaders. Should all fall it would 
be "midnight streaked with lightning." 



PREFACE. 

Not scientific to mix up science and religion 
in the same book ? Then God himself is unsci- 
entific, for he has so largely and legibly written 
himself into that Book of Nature that contains all 
the sciences that even the heathen "are without 
excuse for not reading his eternal power and god- 
head in the things that are made. " Is it scientific 
to attack religion from the side of science, and 
unscientific to defend it from the same side? Is 
it scientific to illustrate one science by another, 
as is daily done without rebuke, and unscientific 
to illustrate that supreme science which we call 
religion by that other science which we call as- 
tronomy? Is it scientific to notice the gigantic 
tracks of birds in the rocks of the Connecticut 
valley, and unscientific to notice in both earthly 
and heavenly strata the still more gigantic foot- 
prints of the Creator? Was it scientific and in 
excellent taste for the scholar who in the year 
1500 found an aged parchment in the monastery 
of Corwey, in Westphalia, to cry out so that all 
Europe heard him, "This reads like Tacitus," 
and unscientific as well as in bad taste for the 
scholar who finds still more ancient inscriptions 
in the cloistered heavens, to cry out loudly, "This 
reads like God"? 

Lyme, Connecticut. 




«T4 



L INSTRUMENTS 7 

II. ASPECTS 33 

III ACCURACIES 43 

IV. TRANSFORMATIONS 5 i 

V. NUMBERS 99 

VI. DISTANCES 109 

VII. SIZES 121 

VIII. NATURES 127 

IX. MOTIONS 139 

X. ORBITS 151 

XI. PERIODS 161 

XII. PERTURBATIONS 171 

XIII. SYSTEMS 181 

XIV. STABILITIES 193 

XV. FORCES 201 

XVI. POPULATIONS . . . . . . . 213 

XVII. MYSTERIES 241 

XVIII. MISCELLANIES 271 



I. INSTRUMENTS. 



1. LIGHT. 

2. EYE. 

3. TELESCOPE. 

4. SPECTROSCOPE. 

5. OBSERVATORY. 

6. DOCTRINE OF GRAVITY. 

7. CALCULUS. 




THE GREAT REFLECTING TELESCOPE AT PARIS. 



Celestial Empires. 



I. INSTRUMENTS. 

The wonders of astronomy are shown by 
means which are wonders in themselves. One 
of these means is light. Without this we should 
know nothing of the heavenly bodies. We can- 
not touch them, and so know them by the sense 
of feeling. They send to us no sound, and so 
we cannot know them by the sense of hearing. 
Though sometimes called flowers of the sky, and 
richly deserving the name, they send down to us 
no fragrance, so that we cannot know them by 
the sense of smelling. In short, for all our knowl- 
edge of them, even of their existence, we are in- 
debted to the sense of sight, and the necessary 
means of sight is light. 

The old Greeks had a divinity whose name 
was Hermes. He was the messenger of the gods. 
He was beautiful, was exceeding fleet, carried a 
wand by which magical things could be done, 



8 CELESTIAL EMPIRES- 

brought great messages down to men and carried 
great ones back, was the patron of mysteries as 
well as of eloquent speech. Light is the modern 
Hermes. It is the news-carrier from the skies to 
the earth, and doubtless from the earth to the 
skies. In beauty, in fleetness, in eloquence, in 
feats of many names, in bright mysteriousness, it 
has vastly the advantage of the old messenger; 
and it has the no small additional advantage of 
not being light-fingered as well as light-footed, 
of not being a fiction and a teller of fictions, as 
was the old Hermes, but, on the contrary, both a 
glorious fact and a teller of glorious facts. 

Who knows what light is ? Some suppose it 
to be a material substance. Still more, just now, 
suppose it to be vibrations in such a substance. 
Both are mere suppositions, the latter explaining 
better than the other certain facts, but leaving 
other facts unexplained. On all hands light is 
confessed to be a mystery, and a great one, full 
of unsolved and apparently unsolvable problems, 
a great language, of which only here and there a 
character has come to be understood. 

But though a mystery, it has been decomposed 
into several equal mysteries. Have you seen 
what one gets by passing light through a prism ? 
What rich and beautiful colors ! And they -have 
been found to be the cause of all the beautiful 



INSTRUMENTS. 9 

colors in nature and art. In these wide realms 
what an immense variety of pleasing hues, so 
grateful to the eye and so useful for distinguish- 
ing between objects; nay, what splendor in many 
flowers and birds and insects and gems and sunset - 
skies ! Not even Solomon the Magnificent in all 
his glory was arrayed like some of these; and 
both they and Solomon owe all the beauty of 
their royal and variegated vesture to the vari- 
ously-colored elements of light. Indeed, without 
them most of the objects about us would not ap- 
pear at all, but would hide in the universal dead 
monotony of white. 

It is the light that paints the gold or silver of 
your hair, the azure or raven of your eye, and 
the mingled rose and lily of your cheek. The 
whole landscape about you would be as nothing 
without light; for it is this that gives the grass its 
greenness, the water its sparkle, the flower its fes- 
tival robes, the forest its autumnal array. This 
work of beautifying man and his surroundings is 
as much the office of li^ht as it is to show him to 
his work till the evening. The morning breaks 
over the eastern hills, and you see to go your 
way, to build your house, to sow your field, to 
gather your harvest. Light means both business 
and beauty. 

In what floods is this useful and beautiful ele- 



IO CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ment poured forth ! With what open-handed 
freeness does the shining gift come to the cabin 
as well as to the palace ! And where it falls, 
though it be in Augean stables, it gets no stain 
from the vileness on which it lingers and which 
it glorifies. Is this winter ? The icicle begins to 
trickle with dew. The crusted snow, on whose 
hard surface the feet of- walking men a few hours 
since left no mark, grows soft and yields to an 
infant's foot. The ground that shows itself here 
and there, but just now cold and stony to the 
touch, as you put hand to it again feels warm. 
What is the matter? It is an open secret. Light 
is abroad on hard icicle and snowy crust and fro- 
zen sod. The soil quickens. The prison of the 
great chemical forces is thrown open and their 
chains stricken off. The seeds, the plants, the 
animals feel a dynamical reinforcing of their life. 
The currents of health and vigor course through 
all the veins and arteries of nature with new en- 
ergy. Take a sun-bath, O invalid ! Thin away 
the trees from your shaded and damp house, O 
candidate for fevers and agues and malaria of all 
sorts ! Turn over the rough, acid sod, O discon- 
solate farmer, and let in at the roots of things the 
vis medicatrix of sunshine, and see how soon mat- 
ters will mend ! 

Would you have in a twinkling such a faith- 



INSTRUMENTS. II 

ful picture of yourself or your house or your favor- 
ite landscape as a human artist could not make if 
he would, and perhaps would not make if he 
could ? At a mere trifle of cost would you have 
all the noted objects in the world, accurately pic- 
tured, lying on your parlor- table, or, better still, 
the faces of dear ones who themselves are gone 
or going into the invisible ? By all means apply 
to this artist, he does his work so quickly, so 
cheaply, and so well. It is true that he has his 
habits which you must humor, his own settled 
w r ays of doing things to which you must conform ; 
but when you have done this you will find him a 
willing and amazing workman, and one that 
never gets tired. 

Do you want to see a traveller that has trav- 
elled farther and longer than any other traveller 
has ever done (I mean this side of the angels, 
though I am by no means sure that I am bound 
to make this exception)? You do not need to 
travel yourself to some distant metropolis, and 
there, " bored with elbow points through both 
your sides," catch a glimpse between the shoul- 
ders of huwahing multitudes of some illustrious 
Humboldt. Just step out into the evening and 
look up. Here is a ray of light that has just 
arrived from one of the fixed stars. It has been 
some millions of years on its way, though it has 



12 CELESTIAL EMPIRES 

moved on a straight line and at an unresting pace 
of more than 180,000 miles a second. Tired? 
No. Ready to go on other millions of years at 
the same rate? Yes. What news does this 
Hermes bring? We shall see. But perhaps he 
will tell us, among other things, not only that the 
stars are, but what they are made of, their dis- 
tances from us and one another, and the measure 
of their great motions and orbits. 

Such is one of our astronomical instruments — 
a bright, cheery, beautiful, wonderful thing, 
which has come to be taken as the symbol of 
almost everything that is exceedingly valuable 
and splendid — as knowledge and happiness and 
goodness and even God. ( c God is light, and in 
him is no darkness at all." 

The Eye is another astronomical instrument. 
The astronomer needs it in order to use the light. 
Serviceable as that element is, its service chiefly 
depends on our being provided with a complex 
and elaborate instrument that seems made with 
special reference to it. We did not make the 
eye, we had nothing to do with contriving and 
adapting its various parts; and yet it is as much 
an instrument elaborately adjusted to an end as is 
a watch or a sewing-machine. 

This instrument is a very common one, also 
very uncommon. Every man has a pair of eyes; 



INSTRUMENTS. 1 3 

every brute animal is at least as well provided 
for; and some insects have each thousands and 
thousands of the organs of vision. It would be 
impossible to put into figures the sum total of 
those glittering orbs that in the air, on the land, 
and in the depths of water drink in the rays of 
lio-ht and turn them into vision. But these most 
common things are at the same time uncom- 
monly wonderful. 

Study the human eye as it is shown by anato- 
mists and physiologists, and as we have not space 
to show it. Behold an organ having reference to 
an element quite external to itself whose chief 
source is very distant, and also to millions of ob- 
jects which compose our scenery of earth and sky; 
an organ placed in the most elevated part of the 
body so as to command the most extensive pros- 
pect; placed in the front so as to most readily 
preside over the direction in which we habitually 
move; placed in a strong, bony socket which 
defends it from the heavier external injuries; 
imbedded in a soft cushion, so that its delicate 
texture cannot be hurt by the bony walls around 
it as it rests on them and turns swiftly hither and 
thither at the bidding of the will ; furnished with 
lids to close over it in sleep, to wipe it, to cut off 
the outer rays of light that would confuse vision, 
to protect it by their involuntary and instantane- 



14 CEWSSTIAI, EMPIRES. 

ous shutting against the lighter kind of injuries; 
furnished with an apparatus of muscles by which 
it can be rapidly turned at choice in any direction 
so as to vary the field of vision as the needs of life 
may suggest; furnished with a self-acting system 
of appliances by which the ball is kept lubricated 
for easy movement; furnished with a conduit to 
carry off any superfluous moisture; furnished 
with just that shape out of ten thousand possible 
shapes which is the only one that can refract all 
the rays of light to a single surface, and thus give 
distinct vision ; furnished with a retina, or natural 
canvas, on which its pictures of external objects 
can be formed, of just the right size and at just 
the right distance behind the lenses of the eye; 
furnished with lenses of different substances hav- 
ing different refractive powers, thereby preventing 
the light from being resolved into the prismatic 
colors and thus misrepresenting objects; furnished 
in front with a perforated membrane that by self- 
adjustment adapts it to different degrees of light, 
also with a system of pulleys and ligaments that 
at a moment's warning alter its convexity and 
the relative position of parts so as to adapt it to 
objects at different distances; and, what is most 
wonderful of all, provided in some mysterious 
way with the means of expressing the mind it- 
self, so that one may look into its crystal depths 



INSTRUMENTS. 15 

and see intellectuality and scorn and wrath and 
love and almost every spiritual state and ac- 
tion. 

Now if this is not an amazing congeries of 
adaptations there is and can be nothing amazing. 
If found to be the work of a human artist it would 
be called a perfect marvel of ingenuity and wis- 
dom. What a source of pleasure, of beauty, of 
safety, of culture, of business, of power ! 

And this exquisite instrument is another 
means of astronomical research, one, it should be 
noted, altogether inexpensive, in possession of 
every person, in the use of which we all are prac- 
tised and skilful, and to whose unaided powers 
we already owe many valuable astronomical dis- 
coveries. 

Telescope, This word at once suggests as- 
tronomy — as the eye and light do not. All know 
that it means an instrument for viewing distant 
objects, and especially the heavenly bodies; and 
also that by means of it very many striking facts 
of the far sky, otherwise unattainable, have been 
reached. They also know that it has the faculty 
of making some objects seem larger, and of bring- 
ing into view objects otherwise invisible. 

The original telescope of about three hundred 
years ago was a very simple affair. It consisted 
of two curved glasses fastened to a long rod, one 



1 6 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

to form an image of the object viewed, and the 
other to magnify that image — called, respectively, 
the object-glass and the eye-glass. 

Gradually improvements came.. The glasses 
were inclosed in a tube so as to cut off the confu- 
sing light coming from other objects than the one 
to be view r ed. The imperfect quality and shape 
of the glass employed gradually, but very slowly, 
ripened into lenses so pure in quality, so uniform 
in structure, and so accurately curved, as to leave 
nothing to be desired in these respects. At first 
the glass decomposed the light into the prismatic 
colors, and gave the objects looked at hues that 
did not belong to them. Means were at length 
found for correcting this defect. Owing to the 
difficulty of getting large pieces of pure and even- 
structured glass, at first the object-glass was very 
small ; but now, though not easily or cheaply, 
lenses of admirable quality can be made about 
three feet in diameter. At first it was no small 
matter to get and steadily hold a telescope in po- 
sition. So the aid of machinery was invoked, 
and, finally, the hand of a child is able to point 
and keep the largest instrument to any quarter of 
the heavens. Indeed, the tube is made self-mov- 
ing, so that it will follow a star in its daily path 
across the sky without any help from the obser- 
ver. At first there were no contrivances for 




THE MERIDIAN CIRCLE, REFRACTING, IN THE PARIS OBSERVARORY. 



INSTRUMENTS. 1 7 

measuring angles attached to the telescope; now 
every large instrument is furnished with them in 
great perfection. 

Have you seen a first-class telescope of to-day? 
It looks almost as complex and mysterious to a 
beginner in astronomy as do the heavens them- 
selves which it is meant to reveal. And yet it is 
nothing more than the first telescope of Galileo, 
supplied with certain devices which have from 
time to time occurred to astronomers for enabling 
it to do its work more easily and perfectly. The 
little one has become a thousand. The rude pole 
of the great Florentine, with two bits of rounded 
glass stuck on it, has become a brass palace. I 
shall not try to describe it by its parts. Anatomy 
is apt to be destructive. Better take an early op- 
portunity of seeing the wonder; for a wonder it is, 
of beautiful appearance, of scientific knowledge, 
and of mechanical skill. It is an elaborate sup- 
plemental eye, made out of stone and metal by 
the crafty and patient hands of three centuries. 
Here are tons of weight and thousands of parts ; 
but so skilfully framed and balanced is the mas- 
sive instiument that it turns in every direction 
almost as noiselessly and easily as do the revol- 
ving skies themselves. 

This is the largest refracting telescope. The 
image of the object viewed is formed by refract- 



1 8 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ing the rays of light through a glass of the proper 
shape. But this image may also be formed by 
reflection from a mirror or speculum. This may 
be made much larger than an object-glass, and so 
can gather much more light. The largest reflect- 
ing telescope in the world has a speculum six 
feet in diameter, a length of fifty-two feet, and a 
weight of four tons. This instrument, belonging 
to the Earl of Rosse, at Parsonstown, Ireland, col- 
lects 250,000 times as much light from an object 
as does the naked eye, and so is specially fitted 
for viewing very faint and distant objects. 

With these two sorts of telescopes, the refract- 
ing and reflecting, many great results have been 
obtained — simply by looking. No genius is 
needed, no long training in the schools, no com- 
prehensive, w T ide-homoned learning, no manual 
or optical skill. Any child, simply by setting 
eye to the wonderful tube as it points, like some 
huge columbiad, at the sky, is able to master 
many illustrious facts which but for it would never 
have been seen. It is not too much to say that 
this piece of astronomical ordnance, thundering 
silently against the nightly skies, has done more 
execution and brought about more unconditional 
surrenders than all the artilleries of the nations. 
It has gained more and greater victories than 
ever did Alexander or Marlborough or Napo- 



INSTRUMENTS. 19 

leon; has triumphed oftener and more splendidly 
than the whole family of Scipios or Caesars. No 
blood has stained the azure fields above us; no 
noise nor smoke has billowed through the con- 
cave as our great cylinder has played away on 
the fortifications of the cloistered heavens; but 
down, piece by piece, they have come, and science 
has mounted through the breach and taken wide 
possession. There remains, it is true, much land 
to be possessed. Yonder Land of Promise is a 
very, very wide one; even victors will not over- 
run it in a hurry. Let us be thankful for so 
auspicious a beginning. Whether it is more than 
half the battle remains to be seen. 

Spectroscope. As we have seen, light 
passed through a prism separates into a band 
of various colors. This band is called a spectrum. 
If the spectrum is that of an incandescent solid 
or liquid, its different colors pass into one another 
without any decided break: if it is that of an 
incandescent gas or vapor, it is crossed by bright 
colored lines wholly apart from one another: if 
it is that of an incandescent solid or liquid shi- 
ning through an incandescent gas or vapor of 
lower temperature, then the spectrum is crossed 
by sharply-defined black lines which vary in 
place and number according to the nature of the 
gas — having the same place and number as do 



20 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

the bright lines of the gas where it shines alone. 
So, when we find the black lines in the spectrum 
of any star agreeing in these repects with the 
colored lines peculiar to any gas, it is inferred 
that this gas is present in an incandescent state 
in the atmosphere of the star. 

But this is not all. It is observed that with 
increase of density a vapor or gas increases the 
breadth and number of its bright lines so as to 
suggest that a continuous spectrum might finally 
be reached. With an increase of heat the rela- 
tive intensity of the different lines is sometimes 
altered; also new lines appear and old ones dis- 
appear. If the incandescent substance is mov- 
ing towards us, its lines are displaced somewhat 
towards the violet end of the spectrum : if moving 
away from us, the displacement is towards the red 
end of the spectrum; and the amount of the dis- 
placement is proportioned to the velocity. So 
when we look at the spectrum of a star we are 
often able to infer from it, not only what ele- 
ments enter into its composition, but also the 
amount and direction of its motion on the line of 
vision, also something of its state as to tempera- 
ture and density. 

There are difficulties in interpreting many 
celestial spectra. They are often exceeding faint. 
And then the very fact that the lines belonging 




SPECTROSCOPE, WITH RETURMNG-BEAM. 




TELESPECTROSCOPE. 



INSTRUMENTS. 21 

to any gas or vapor are found to vary with its 
temperature, density, thickness, motion, distance, 
as well as with the state of the body behind it in 
these respects, creates embarrassment. In the 
more delicate inquiries only experts of special 
faculty and training can be trusted — and not 
always they. They sometimes differ widely 
among themselves. It is still uncertain whether 
the gaseous envelope of a star may not be so 
dense and deep and absorbent as to completely 
cut off the light of a solid nucleus and so report 
to the eye only its own bright lines. Spectrum 
analysis is yet in its infancy. But it is a very 
promising infancy. It has already achieved 
much, and many other achievements seem to be 
knocking at the door. 

Now the spectroscope is an instrument for 
making and conveniently examining a spectrum. 
A compact form of this instrument is attached to 
the eye-piece of the telescope; and thus connect- 
ed, by means of the principles just stated, it has 
made us acquainted with the elementary consti- 
tution and present state of many of the heavenly 
bodies to an extent which a few years ago we 
could hardly have imagined possible. A great 
result by means beautifully simple. We look at 
a little strip of light ribbon, and lo, we know that 
yonder star has iron and other metals in it — per- 



23 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

haps know that it largely consists of the same 
sorts of matter we are familiar with in our world. 
So a new tie is found between us and the far-off 
regions of the universe; and the instrument that 
finds it is fitly called telespectroscope. At its hands 
the unity of nature, as looking to one Author, 
gets a new emphasis. 

Observatory. To use our light and eyes 
and telescopes to the best advantage we need to 
be elevated somewhat above the surrounding 
country. So we get a clearer air. So we get 
clear of trees and buildings and hills, and com- 
mand a wide horizon. We need also, especially 
in these latitudes, shelter for the observer and for 
his delicate and costly instruments. So we must 
have a building, and a building so made as to 
allow our instrument free access to all parts of 
the heavens. That is, it must have a revolving 
dome. But a high structure having heavy ma- 
chinery and instruments to support, and located 
in a latitude subject to high winds, needs to be 
very solidly and massively built; especially as 
every trifling jar in the building is magnified by 
the whole power of the instrument which it con- 
tains. Hence lofty and massive towers have to 
be built for the higher astronomical purposes. 
They are so costly that they are generally found 
in their completed form only in connection with 



INSTRUMENTS. 23 

the wealthier universities, or as furnished by en- 
dowing cities or nations. 

Observatories were in use long before tele- 
scopes. As far back as we can trace, lofty and 
massive structures of many sorts were used for 
observations on the stars, as the Temple of Belus 
at Babylon, the tomb of Osmandias in Egypt, to 
say nothing of pyramids and other high struc- 
tures in various parts of the world. The earliest 
modern observatory was built at Cassel in 1561 
by the Landgrave of Hesse. In 1576 arose that 
of Tycho Brahe in the island of Huen. In the 
next century the royal observatories of Paris and 
Greenwich were founded. Gradually, as the 
bearing of astronomical observations on naviga- 
tion came to be better understood, these watch- 
towers of the skies and friends of commerce were 
multiplied, until now every considerable civilized 
nation has its own observatory — built, equipped, 
and supported at the public expense. The most 
noted of these, on account of the magnificence of 
their appointments or the value of the work they 
have done or the lustre of the names connected 
with them, are found at Dorpat, Russia, at Pul- 
kova, Sweden, at Konigsberg and Bonn, Prus- 
sia, at Paris, France, at Greenwich, England. 
To these belong such reputations as those of 
Arago and Bessel and Struve and Argelander. 



24 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

In addition to this sort of observatory which 
has become in our day so sumptuous and beauti- 
ful, from whose heights such wide prospects are 
given, and whose solid and deeply founded 
strength so seems to defy the rage of the elements 
and even time itself that it challenges our admi- 
ration almost as much as do the sky-conquering 
instruments it contains,, there is another obser- 
vatory still more remarkable. Are not our com- 
mon observatories fixtures ? Once built, do they 
not stand on the same spot for ever? If they 
were only easily transferable from one point of 
the earth to another, could be cheaply and 
smoothly spirited away some hundreds of millions 
of miles nearer the heavenly bodies than they 
now are, it would sometimes be a great conve- 
nience. Well, this is done by means of that un- 
derlying observatory that we call the earth. This 
is the great celestial lookout. By its rounded 
form, transparent atmosphere, and central posi- 
tion among the stars of our firmament (of which 
more hereafter) it gives us a grand outlook into 
the populous heavens. By turning on its axis it 
brings successively into view all parts of the 
heavens; whereas, without this rotation we could 
only see a single hemisphere of the sky, except 
by travelling half round the globe. By its move- 
ment about the sun it brings us nearer some of 



INSTRUMENTS. 25 

the stars by near two hundred millions of miles 
than we should be without this motion, and so 
enables us to discover, as we shall see, important 
facts otherwise unattainable. And then this trav- 
elling observatory of ours moves so smoothly and 
quietly from place to place that no senses or 
instruments, however delicate, can detect the 
slightest tremor. It is so stoutly built, with its 
endless " munitions of rocks, " that we have done 
our best at describing firmness and stability in a 
thing when we have likened it to the " founda- 
tions of the earth and the everlasting hills. ". 
Admirable observatory ! ready made to hand — 
vast in size, sumptuous in appointments beyond 
any palace we ever saw, usable by everybody 
without charge and with equal freedom (knock 
at the door of any other first-class observatory for 
a like privilege and see what you will get), built 
and kept in repair without a penny of cost to 
anybody, carrying us and all our secondary obser- 
vatories away with magnificent swiftness and 
comfort on great journeys of discovery and aston- 
ishment among the constellations — surely this is 
a wonderful observatory ! 

The Calculus and Doctrine of Gravity. 
There are many arts and sciences which con- 
tribute to our knowledge of the heavens. But 
among these the mathematics are preeminent 



26 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

The heavens are mathematically built, and we 
can advance but a little way towards understand- 
ing them before we are obliged to summon to our 
aid all forms of the science of magnitude. But 
there is one form of this science, first expounded 
and used by Newton and I,eibnit2 about two 
hundred years ago, which has condensed into itself 
all the mathematical potentialities, and become 
the confessed king of all our means of opening 
up the profounder mysteries of the sky. This is 
now called the Differential and Integral Calculus. 
I will not here stop to explain its nature; for this 
is not necessary to a fair understanding of the 
great astronomical facts. But for the original 
discovery of many of these facts a thorough 
knowledge of this branch of science was indis- 
pensable; and no one can now understand the 
proofs on which a large part of our modern 
astronomy rests without being profoundly skilled 
in the use of this great instrument of research. 
No greater is known to scholars. Taking in his 
hand the doctrine of gravity and telescopic facts 
as a glittering two-edged sword, this Black 
Knight has gone forth among the planets and 
comets and stars and demanded of them secrets 
hidden from the foundation of the world — the 
secrets of their orbits and mutual relations — and 
has come back heavily laden with spoils richer 



INSTRUMENTS. 2J 

than ever came from discomfited kings. I cannot 
say that he is beautiful to look at — as I have oaid 
of the light and the eye and the telescope and the 
observatory. To those not familiar with him he 
has, I must confess, a forbidding aspect; so far 
as dress and glitter are concerned, he holds them 
in supreme contempt; he is no such a holiday 
warrior as displays himself on parade in peacock 
millinery of plumes and scarlet and gilt. It is 
only a plain soldier in battered steel cap and 
ironsides that we see. But he is a giant; and his 
sword is sharp as Saladin's and heavy as Rich- 
ard's; and he is a veteran with an old-time habit 
of conquering; and, besides, he fights only the 
battles of truth, progress, and the Lord. Nobody 
can subsidize him to fight any other. So the 
hard-favored man of war has much to recommend 
him. Our militant astronomy would not lose 
him on any account. It would be losing her 
right arm. He is a host in himself. And, as his 
eye is not dim nor his natural force abated with 
age, but rather the contrary, we may confidently 
count on still further achievements from this 
veteran — who is taller than the tallest stone ob- 
servatory and more commands the secrets of the 
skies. 

Such are some of the instruments of our pres- 
ent astronomy; by no means the whole of them. 



28 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Whoever examines the equipment of a first-class 
observatory will find there many things of which 
I have said nothing, and of which I propose to 
say nothing. Indeed, if I should undertake to 
mention all the astronomical helps, I should be 
obliged to mention about all the arts and all the 
sciences, for it would be hard to find a single one 
which has not contributed in some way and in 
some degree to our knowledge of the heavens. 
Especially is astronomy debtor to religion— reli- 
gion, which is both a science and an art and the 
common friend and helper of all branches of 
knowledge, leavening the soul with the nobler 
sympathies and tastes, purging its sight from 
gross humors, lifting it to cleater airs and wider 
horizons, inspiring a sincere love of truth and 
desire to know God in his works. The great 
founders of our modern astronomy were religious 
men. Copernicus, Kepler, and, above all, Sir 
Isaac Newton, who may be said to have fairly 
unlocked the heavens to us, were all men to 
whom science was only the handmaid of devo- 
tion, who loved to ' ' think the thoughts of God 
after him," and to whom the great charm of 
astronomical study was the fact that "the heav- 
ens declare the glory of God and the firmament 
showeth his handiwork. ' ' 

Astronomy has many helpers; but the instru- 



INSTRUMENTS. 29 

ments which I have dwelt upon are the chief 
ones used in helping; and by means of them 
astronomy has come to great estate. It is to-day 
a more eloquent oration than orator ever spoke, a 
loftier epic than ever poet sang, a wealthier har- 
vest than ever turned to gold on the banks of the 
Nile. 



Celestial Empires. 



II. ASPECTS. 



1. WITH NAKED EYE. 

2. WITH TELESCOPE. 



ASPECTS. S3 



II. ASPECTS. 

Aristotle, as quoted by Cicero, supposes a 
people inhabiting the interior of the earth to find 
their way suddenly for the first time to the sur- 
face. What amazement they feel as, with shaded 
and yet half-blinded eyes, they look towards the 
magnificent sun and watch the silent majesty of 
his progress through the heavens ! And at the 
coming on of night, with no less wonder do they 
look up at the milder glory of the moon, moving 
westward with what seem millions of bright 
attendants — Venus with her soft, rich ray, Jupi- 
ter with his commanding beam, Mars with his 
red glance and martial aspect, Vega and Alde- 
baran and Sirius and Arcturus (where shall one 
stop?), each with its own peculiar beauty, Ple- 
iades, Hyades, and many another shining group 
and cluster, till the eye fastens on the astounding 
arch of the Milky Way with its snowstorm of 
stars, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Orion, and all the 
other superb constellations which garnish the 
chambers of the north and south, and whose 
names and fame outdate all history. How the 
whole heavens seem to sing and exult and reign 
as they sweep westward in their orderly array ! 



34 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

No wonder that astronomy was the earliest of 
the sciences — that in the morning twilight of the 
race, on the plateans and in the transparent airs 
of Shinar, large-browed men gave themselves up 
to star-gazing, and asked, "What mean yon radi- 
ant objects ? Are they not sentinels on the celes- 
tial battlements ? Are they not guardian spirits 
keeping watch with eyes aflame over a slumber- 
ing world? Are they not worshipful divinities; 
at least, must not such glorious objects, beaming 
down on the world so royally, have some control- 
ling influence on its destinies? If they are not 
gods, do they not nevertheless reign over us as if 
they were ?' f And not a few bowed their heads 
and worshipped. Astrologers became cabinet 
ministers, and nations were governed by horo- 
scopes. But one far wiser than the rest struck 
his harp and sang, "When I consider the heav- 
ens, the work of Thy fingers; the moon and the 
stars which Thou hast ordained I" 

Such is the aspect of the heavens to the naked 
eye under ordinary circumstances. But under 
extraordinary conditions — say a remarkably clear 
night of January in our latitude; or, better still, 
the best night in old Chaldsea where the astro- 
nomical cradle was rocked; or, still better, the 
best night in that part of the southern hemisphere 
on which vertically looks down the brightest page 



ASPECTS. 35 

of the whole heavenly book (the zones between 
500 and 700, and where the Milky Way meets 
the Southern Cross) — a still fairer scene unfolds. 
Says Humboldt, "The appearance of the Magel- 
lanic Clouds, of the brightly-beaming constella- 
tion Argo, of the Milky Way between Scorpio, 
the Centaur, and the Southern Cross, the pictur- 
esque beauty, if one may so speak, of the whole 
expanse of the southern celestial hemisphere, has 
left on my mind an ineffaceable impression. ' ' 

Says Sir John Herschel in 1833 from the Cape 
of Good Hope, ' c I had already become familiar 
with most of the great objects of the Southern 
circumpolar regions so rich in wonders — such as 
the two Magellanic Clouds, the great nebula 
about Eta Argus, the great clusters Omega Cen- 
tauri and 47 Toucani. I may truly say that I 
felt repaid by the views thus obtained of these 
most astonishing phenomena for all the trouble 
and inconvenience of my voyage hither. They 
are really magnificent, and such as no descrip- 
tion can do justice to. M 

In those Southern latitudes on favorable nights 
one does not need to be a cultured observer, like 
Herschel or Humboldt, in order to be impressed 
with the glory of the celestial scenery. An aver- 
age pair of eyes with an average manhood behind 
them will answer, the shining is so jubilant, tri- 



36 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

umphant. What intense brilliancy! What rejoi- 
cing effulgence ! What holiday heavens ! What 
conflagrations of glory ! Was ever such a dome? 
Travellers sometimes look up with awe on the 
pictured and mighty arches that spring airily over 
St. Peter's. But what a feeble imitation of the 
great vaulted roof of our Father's house — of the 
glorious fretted dome that bends over the great 
cathedral of nature ! And yet beneath the South- 
ern Cross multitudes are worshipping fetishes; or, 
what is worse, not worshipping at all. 

This nearly at the sea-level. But what if one 
gets rid of the lower quarter of the atmosphere by 
ascending with the astronomer-royal of Scotland 
the Peak of TenerifFe, some 8,000 feet? Here 
the usual range of vision is about sextupled, and 
the grasp of the eye on light is multiplied by 
thirty-six. "Jupiter shines with extraordinary 
splendor. The stars hardly seem to twinkle at 
all. The lustre of the Milky Way and Zodiacal 
Ivight is indescribable." Of course still brighter 
aspects are given at certain still greater eleva- 
tions where of later years astronomical observa- 
tions have been made, as at the Etnean Observa- 
tory, the highest building in Europe, or at Mounts 
Whitney or Puno, a matter of some 13,000 feet 
above the sea. 

So appear the heavens to the average naked 



aspects. 37 

eye. But let its pupil be dilated by belladonna 
and they will appear brighter still. Enlarge that 
eye till it becomes as large as we sometimes see 
in men, often in brutes, and always in the ox- 
eyed Junos of ancient sculpture, and the stars 
will look into it still more glowingly. Expand 
that eye again till it matches that orb, c ' large as 
a Grecian shield," which Homer ascribes to the 
Cyclops, or that which terribly rolled in the head 
of the geologic deinothere, and still more glories 
would add themselves to the already blazing 
heavens. Once more expand till the eye-diame- 
ter is that of the speculum of the largest reflecting 
telescope, which gathers from a star 250,000 times 
as much light as the average eye receives, and 
every celestial object will be brightened a quar- 
ter of a million of times. 

Now this is the eye which the user of such a 
telescope practically has. A star as it appears to 
the naked eye is a tame and dull thing compared 
with the same object as it shows in the field of a 
great telescope. Sir William Herschel seldom 
looked at the larger stars in his great reflector, 
because their blaze was injurious to his sight. 
He says, "The first appearance of Sirius an- 
nounced itself at a great distance like the dawn 
of the morning, and came on by degrees, increa- 
sing in brightness till this brilliant star at last 



38 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

entered the field of the telescope with all the 
splendor of the rising sun, and forced me to take 
my eye from the beautiful sight." In the Ros- 
sian reflector one could almost imagine Sirius to 
be a divine face or shield. And the Pleiades are 
no longer the Seven Stars that one has so long 
known and admired, but that group transfigured 
almost beyond recognition. The great cluster in 
the constellation called Hercules, or in the Cen- 
taur, seems to have had a door opened in heaven 
just behind it, and to be swimming in the un- 
speakable glory that pours forth. And various 
colors appear where the naked eye hardly saw 
more than one. Some stars are red, some blue, 
some green, some yellow, some white; in short, 
all the colors of the rainbow or of the gems that 
sparkle in the cabinets of kings are represented. 
Of course, if the great telescopic eye that peers 
up from its low place through the thick skies of 
Ireland could be set up on the summit of the 
Californian Mount Hamilton, we should see still 
greater things than these. Would not one be 
reminded of the city whose foundations are gar- 
nished with all manner of precious stones ? and 
would he not seem to catch glimpses of the ame- 
thyst and the emerald and the jasper and the ruby 
and the beryl, and still other jewels that make up 
the twelve foundations of the city of God? 



ASPECTS. 39 

It were worth our while to use a telescope 
were it only for the new beauty which it gives the 
heavens. And it also gives us a truer view of 
them, as well as one more magnificent. Our 
photographs as well as our painted portraits often 
flatter us. Somehow we have been made out 
better-looking than we are. We have been 
brightened up far beyond our " happiest expres- 
sion." But it is impossible to brighten up the 
pictures of the heavenly bodies till they seem 
more glorious than they actually are. Our lar- 
gest instruments bring to us only a small part of 
their real brightness. In fact they are like their 
Maker in this respect. We cannot get too bright 
a conception of him. When we have done our 
best to make it fair and grand, we know that we 
have fallen infinitely short of doing him justice. 
Do not be afraid, O painter of the Infinite; give 
wings to your imagination, summon all your 
powers of expression, use your fairest colors, glo- 
rify your canvas, get as near as you can to a per- 
fect ideal of mingled loveliness and majesty; in 
a word, invoke all the cunning of thought and 
hand that the greatest masters have had, what 
is that picture of yours, after all, but an image 
dimmed by innumerable reflections of the Infi- 
nite! 



III. ACCURACIES. 



I. OF OBSERVATION. 
2,, OF THEORY. 



ACCURACIES. 43 



III. ACCURACIES. 

In the earliest time men contented themselves 
with such facts about the heavenly bodies as a 
mere gazing at them might discover. But, at 
least as early as the time of the Greek astronomer 
Hipparchus (B. C. 125), it became clear that in 
order to see whether any changes are going on in 
the sky, and, if so, what changes and how great, 
it would be necessary to locate the stars carefully, 
that is, give their position in the sky with refer- 
ence to two fixed circles that cut each other at 
right angles, just as we now give the situation of 
places on the earth by their latitudes and longi- 
tudes. Accordingly Hipparchus, and after him 
Ptolemy, prepared instruments for measuring an- 
gles and made catalogues of many stars, giving 
their distance from the equinoctial and from its 
intersection with the ecliptic as accurately as 
their instruments would allow. But these instru- 
ments were so rude that they could not measure 
accurately a smaller arc of the sky than ten min- 
utes — about one-third of the moon's apparent di- 
ameter. But Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer, 
who died A. D. 1681, was not satisfied with such 
astronomy as this, and finally succeeded in so im- 



44 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

proving the old instruments as to measure an arc 
of ten seconds — a measure sixty times more deli- 
cate and refined tlian the other. But now, by 
means of the telescope and its various appoint- 
ments, we are able to measure the hundredth part 
of a second, that is, about the 180,000th part of 
the moon's apparent diameter. We have, there- 
fore, reached an accuracy a thousand-fold greater 
than Tycho was able to secure. Such a refine- 
ment of observation would have been incredible 
to astronomers of a few generations back. It is 
now almost incomprehensible to those who have 
not particularly studied the present ways and 
means of securing such accuracy. And yet, like 
many other mysterious things, it is a fact. Arge- 
lander, a German astronomer, has made a cata- 
logue of 324,000 stars whose places are given 
somewhat after this supreme style of accuracy. 
But even this can be exceeded under special cir- 
cumstances. When the very utmost of delicate 
measurement is required, as in determining the 
distance of the sun, we can by certain expedients 
manage to tenfold that last astonishing accuracy 
and measure the 1,000th part of a second — the 
2, 000,000th part of the moon's diameter on the 
sky. Nay, you will find that in measurements 
for finding some stellar distances astronomers 
even take account of such extremely small things 



ACCURACIES. 45 

as the io,oooth part of a second — a space about 
equal to the apparent breadth of a human hair at 
the distance of 94 miles from the observer. Such 
achievements are chiefly due to the telescope. It 
is to angles what the microscope, enabling us to 
count 112,000 lines in an inch, is to linear dimen- 
sions. 

After this wonderful manner astronomers 
measure space. They deal with time in very 
much the same way. If you go to some observ- 
atory, the experienced observer whom you will 
find there tells you that he can with ease, while 
observing, mentally divide a second of time into 
ten equal parts. If you look into a scientific 
journal you will, perhaps, find the times of the 
beginning and ending of the next solar eclipse at 
a given place given to the tenth of a second. If 
you look into some astronomical text-books you 
will find it stated that the interval between two 
consecutive returns of a star to the same meridian 
has demonstrably not altered by one hundredth of 
a second for the last 2,000 years, will be almost 
sure to find the interval between two consecutive 
returns of the sun to the same tropic expressed in 
figures that take account of the 10,000th part of a 
second, and perhaps will read that this interval has 
shortened by 595,oooths of a second in 100 years. 

Such extreme accuracy would be of no use in 



46 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

surveying a field. The millionth part of a square 
inch of ground, even in a city, is "nothing to no- 
nobody.' } But in astronomy, on account of the 
immensity of its spaces, the very small mistake 
of one second in locating an object may alter 
our estimate of its distance from us by 200,000 
times the evidently great distance of the sun. 
Also these extremely delicate measurements ena- 
ble us to answer satisfactorily such questions as 
these: Are the fixed stars really fixed? Are any 
of them physically connected with one another in 
systems somewhat like the solar system? Does 
the law of gravity prevail among them ? What 
are their orbits, periods, distances, and sizes? 
Are they stationary in respect to us? Is our 
solar system itself in motion among the stars? 
And if so, towards what part of the heavens is our 
course directed, at what rate, and around what 
centre, if our path is an orbit? Were it not for 
the fact that our instruments enable us to take 
account of changes in the sky that are almost 
nothings, such questions could never have been 
answered. What great questions they are ! No 
better illustration, perhaps, out of the moral field 
could be given of the importance of littles. We 
are told that the happiness of individuals and 
families depends upon them. We have seen vast 
boulders pivoted on mere points of rock, and the 



ACCURACIES. 47 

fortunes of individuals, families, and even empires 
rising or sinking in the balance by the weight of 
a mere grain of circumstance. A glorious char- 
acter may be gradually built up, like coral isl- 
ands, by means of daily acts that in themselves 
are merest mites, too inconsiderable to attract no- 
tice. And so the glory of our modern astronomy 
is largely conditioned on measurements so small 
as to be almost incredible, and quite incompre- 
hensible to people at large. 

But the accuracy of observation is not the only 
astronomical accuracy that is marvellous. By 
means of the law of gravity as interpreted and 
applied by that great instrument of investigation, 
the Calculus, the astronomer can sit in his study, 
and without looking out of his window, calculate 
just where in the sky one may find many seem- 
ingly very erratic bodies at any given remote 
time. Where will those strangely zigzagging 
bodies called planets be ten years hence? At 
what times, backward or forward indefinitely, are 
eclipses of the sun or moon to be found ? Can. 
you tell other generations when and where to 
look for another occultation of yonder star, an- 
other transit of Venus, another return of yonder 
comet that has not appeared before within the 
whole time of astronomic records ? Such ques- 
tions as these, discouraging as they look at first 



48 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

view, can now be answered with astonishing pre- 
cision. Some of the most useful examples of 
such precision are embodied in the Nautical Al- 
manac — a book published annually for use in 
navigation. This gives for years in advance the 
apparent distances, say at Greenwich, of the 
moon from the sun and from certain fixed stars 
for every three hours — gives them so as never to 
involve an error of more than five seconds of a 
degree. This though in order to do so it is neces- 
sary to take account of twenty-eight disturbances 
in the motion of the moon. By taking account 
of some thirty disturbances more — if he has time 
enough to. do it, and patience enough, and, I 
should add, enough indifference to misspent toil 
and genius and mathematics — the astronomer 
may reduce this trifling possible error to a mere 
ghost of its former ghostly self. But what would 
be the use ! Such exactness would be thrown 
away on the problem of the longitude. The 
sailor can know his place on the seas sufficiently 
well without it. All that a lunar can do to secure 
property and life is done already. And yet we 
are not to despise that extreme possible theo- 
retical exactness. It has no small educational 
value, and may turn to great account in equip- 
ping astronomy for brilliant victories in the near 
future. 



IV. TRANSFORMATIONS. 



1. EARTH. 

2. MOON. 

3. SUN. 

4. PLANETS. 

5. COMETS. 

6. METEORS. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 51 



IV. TRANSFORMATIONS. 

UndKR the various astronomical instrumenst 
certain old astronomical friends appear with sur- 
prisingly new faces. They may even be said to 
be transformed. They are the Earth, the Moon, 
the Sun, and five planets, viz., Mercury, Venus, 
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Perhaps I should add 
comets and meteors. 

All these have been familiarly known, the 
chief of them under their own proper names, 
time out of mind. And, notwithstanding the 
stories that have at times got abroad to the preju- 
dice of two or three of them, they have always 
maintained the most friendly relations with one 
another and with mankind. They have never 
met in the shock of set battle, never collided, 
never even fallen out by the way in some tran- 
sient unpleasantness. So far as we know, here 
is a community without a quarrel, a family with- 
out a family jar. For now untold ages this fam- 
ily has held together in unbroken harmony. It 
is true that we sometimes speak of "disturbances" 
among them — say that they disturb one another's 
motions. But we do not mean by this any un- 
friendly interaction; only such as may obtain, 



52 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

and always does obtain, between the members 
of the most exemplary and loving of households. 
Do not such members influence one another? Is 
not the career of each more or less modified by 
that of every other ? Instead of mutually injur- 
ing they are mutually helpful. As much, doubt- 
less, is true of our celestial household. What 
have been called "disturbances" are merely the 
friendly interactions and agitations that go to 
make a healthy and balanced system. And, as 
far as man is concerned, the poorest in repute of 
all that shining group has always a balance to 
his credit at the Bank of Humanity, does some- 
what to brighten our homes, decorate our sky, 
expand our minds, and lift our thoughts towards 
the Creator. And together they have furnished 
the stepping-stones to most of our ulterior astron- 
omy. We never could have known the distances, 
sizes, motions, forces in other parts of the heavens 
save by means of what we have learned from 
these friendly contributors. They have contribu- 
ted to our mathematics and instruments of obser- 
vation the discipline and culture and facts with- 
out which we must have halted at the very 
threshold of the sky. They have furnished the 
units of comparison, the measuring-rod, by which 
the angel of science has measured the descending 
celestial city of the astronomical heavens. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 53 

The Earth from whose dust men were first 
made, on whose surface they have always lived, 
and from whose bosom they have always drawn 
their support, has a clear right to be considered 
our friend. Some think it deserves to be called 
our mother— "Mother Earth." 

And yet this friend, though well known, was 
also very poorly known till of late. It was not 
thought to be a heavenly body at all. By far 
the greater part of its surface was wholly unex- 
plored. It was supposed to have neither rotation 
nor revolution. Its shape and size and relations 
to the other heavenly bodies were grossly miscon- 
ceived even by the most intelligent ; while to 
people at large in the most advanced communi- 
ties it was only a great plain resting on — they 
knew not what. A few hundred miles from their 
capitals exhausted the geography of the ancient 
Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Egyp- 
tians. The best informed of the Greeks and 
Romans knew scarcly anything of other countries 
than those just about the Mediterranean. The 
greater part of Asia and Africa, the whole of 
America, and the ocean islands were unknown 
to the rest of the w T orld till about 400 years ago. 
And what was considered to be known was known 
after a very scanty fashion. A map of the earth 
as it was known to Copernicus and Galileo 



54 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

would not tax very much the memory of our chil- 
dren. 

Since then great advances have been made. 
The old friend has put on quite a new face. We 
find it to be a heavenly body. Instead of being 
an indefinite plain resting on something else, if 
not on a monster elephant and tortoise, it is now 
known to be a round body some thousands of 
miles in diameter, lying out entirely unsupported 
in space, practical vacancy on all sides of it — in 
short, as the Scripture says, "hung on nothing. " 

L,atterly the surface of this great globe of 
which the ancients knew so little has been great- 
ly revealed. And when the matter is inquired 
into we find that the revelation is largely due to 
the telescope and its adjuncts. Indeed, this in- 
strument has given us all our accurate geography. 
We have now determined astronomically and 
with great exactness the latitude and longitude 
of all the more important points of the earth ; 
have also, by the same means and by dredging, 
gotten a general idea of the great ocean-bed. 
Every civilized nation has provided charts of its 
own coasts so accurately made that they repre- 
sent the contour of the land and of the neighbor- 
ing sea-bottom with almost the fidelity of a Dutch 
portrait or of a photograph. This has been done 
in connection with a system of triangulation in 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 55 

which the telescope and its helpers play a con- 
spicuous part. Some of us have in our libraries 
the Coast Survey Charts of the United States, 
and some of us have remembered, as we admired 
them, that without astronomical instruments and 
learning we should never have had these beauti- 
ful and minutely accurate delineations of that 
astronomical body on which we live. 

The telescope is also the condition of all ex- 
tensive ocean-voyaging. The coast surveys pro- 
vide for the safety of navigation along certain 
favored shores; but if we are to have that knowl- 
edge of the wide earth that comes from immense 
commerce and travel, means must be furnished 
for passing over the oceans freely and safely in 
every direction. In order to do this the sailor 
must be able to find his exact place on the deep 
at any moment. Is he near a lee shore ? Have 
not the strong winds or crafty currents beneath 
been setting him out of his course and near rocks? 
And it is not enough for him to consult his dead- 
reckoning and chronometer; he must verify them 
by observing certain heavenly bodies, and by 
consulting that famous Nautical Almanac which 
is in some sort the sailor's bible, doing for him 
on the natural deeps what the Bible offers to do 
on the spiritual. The substructions of the Nau- 
tical Almanac are the Greenwich Observatory, 



56 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

the telescope, and the doctrine of gravity. These 
are what we come to if we dig down to the very- 
bottom of things and ask how that indispensa- 
ble vade mecum was made. Just as, if we dig 
through the crust of the earth at any point, we 
come to the one crystalline rock that underlies 
the whole, so, if we dig through the Nautical 
Almanac at any page, we find astronomy at the 
bottom. This which has made the deep com- 
paratively safe, and has gradually covered it with 
inquisitive traffickers and travellers into all lands, 
has been the means of a vast accession to our 
knowledge of the earth. What crowded maps 
and bulky geographies are now on the tables of 
our scholars, and even on the desks of the com- 
mon school ! A thoughtful man sees a telescope 
in the background and between the lines of every 
one of them. Compare them with the maps and 
geographies of three centuries ago, and what a 
difference ! 

The chemistry of the stars is properly counted 
a part of astronomy. So terrestrial chemistry and 
geology and other natural sciences, which within 
the present century have added so much to our 
knowledge of our globe, have really an astronom- 
ical character, not merely because the earth is a 
heavenly body, but because of the aid which the 
study of the other heavenly bodies has given in de- 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 57 

veloping them. The geologist goes to his work in 
distant countries in ships astronomically steered, 
studies the intimate structure and succession of fos- 
sils and rocks with optical glasses perfected chiefly 
for astronomical uses, interprets the past of the 
earth in view of climatic conditions growing out 
of astronomical relations, and perhaps concludes 
with Humboldt that "our knowledge of the pri- 
meval ages of the world's physical history does 
not extend sufficiently far to allow our depicting 
the present condition of things as one of develop- 
ment. ' ' The chemist uses in his work light and 
heat and other agents whose chief reservoir is 
found in the astronomical field proper, and to the 
understanding of which the study of astronomy 
has furnished a chief incentive ; and he daily 
gives thanks, or ought to, for the spectroscope 
which so splendidly helps his galvanic battery in 
detecting the composition of bodies. So of our 
botany, zoology, and other natural sciences. 
They are all debtors, and some of them heavily 
so, to astronomy. 

The telescope has also helped us to all our 
precise knowledge of the shape and size of the 
earth. Its general roundness is known by other 
means ; but we have to use the telescope with its 
appliances in order to know that w r e do not live 
on a perfect sphere (of course on so large a body 



58 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

we make no account of even our highest moun- 
tains), but on a sphere somewhat flattened on op- 
posite sides, and also to know what are the exact 
values of the longest and shortest diameters. 
This knowledge is gained by measuring arcs of 
the meridian with very great care in all parts of 
the world, and telescopes have been indispensa- 
ble to such measurements. By these it has been 
found that our extremes of diameter differ by about 
26 miles, while our mean diameter is 7,912 miles. 

This great almost globe — so our astronomy of 
the last few centuries has been teaching us, in 
defiance of the general belief of mankind from 
the beginning — turns quietly on itself once in 
twenty-four hours, without the least noise or jar, 
and with a perfectly uniform motion, thus ma- 
king the whole heavens with their contents seem 
to revolve about us daily. In addition we have 
learned that our rotating earth moves about the 
sun in about 365 days, with no appreciable change 
in this period from age to age. Although we do 
not perceive either of these motions by the sense 
of hearing or feeling, so smoothly and noiseless- 
ly are they made, yet they both are sufficiently 
proved to us by the fact that they furnish the 
simplest and a perfect explanation of the great 
daily and yearly motions in the sky. 

The Moon. Another old friend, as old as the 




THE MOON, FULL AND HALF-FULL. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 59 

earth or older. Ever since man was it has been 
showing its broad, hearty, good-humored face in 
the sky, none the less cheery from being consid- 
erably freckled. Who can doubt its friendliness ! 
especially since its friendly looks are so supported 
by friendly deeds. What a relief to the night ! 
What an illuminator of stumbling paths ! What 
a soft and delicious bath of silver it makes for 
land and sea ! How the sea swells lovingly to- 
wards it and tries to follow it all round the globe, 
as if it could not bear to lose sight of it, and grows 
pure and vital by the effort ! What meant the 
old-time prophet when he said, " Blessed of the 
Lord be his land for the precious things brought 
forth by the sun, and for the precious things put 
forth by the moon"? Beautiful, friendly, smiling 
Moon ! True, some say that thy smile is false 
and treacherous, that thou smitest when thou 
smilest. So said the ancient Egyptians. So said 
the astrologers of the Middle Ages and later, es- 
pecially when they saw the Moon in conjunction 
with Saturn. Then nothing was too bad for it to 
do. Then let men look out for colds, convul- 
sions, jaundice, epilepsy — "all the ills that flesh 
is heir to." Woe to him that was born under the 
" House of the Moon." And the bad stories still 
linger. Bad to sleep in the moonlight, is it? 
Hurts certain crops, does it? That is slander — 



60 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

shall I say superstition ? We will believe neither 
the ancients nor the moderns against our old 
friend. When was there a friend, especially a 
fair one, and never a word spoken against her? 
She does not, Judas-like, betray with a kiss. I,et 
the poets go on praising the queen of the night 
as with far -flo wing, spangled robes she moves 
majestically across the heavens. Even let them, 
if they will, call her a goddess, the " goddess of 
the silver bo w, " Diana, Artemis, Phoebe, Proser- 
pina, Hecate, Astarte ; only let them not worship 
her, as men once did, and as even Solomon the 
Wise seems to have done. 

" With these in troops 
Came Ashtaroth, whom the Phoenicians called 
Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns ; 
To whose bright image nightly by the moon 
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs; 
In Sion also not unsung, where stood 
Her temple on the offensive mountain, built 
By that uxorious king whose heart, though large, 
Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell 
To idols foul." 

That was indeed to be "moon-struck," " lu- 
natic." 

What men knew about the Moon till lately 
was what they could learn by the naked eye only. 
The common use of the eye shows a luminous 
disk about half a degree in diameter, variously 
shaded, apparently moving westward with all the 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 6l 

other bright objects in the sky, and at the same time 
creeping eastward among them so as to make a 
complete circuit of the sky in about twenty-seven 
days — in nearly the same period waning from a 
full disk to nothing and then waxing back to the 
old fulness, in addition suffering occasional eclip- 
ses which, after eighteen years, repeat themselves 
in the same order and at the same intervals as 
before. This period was called Saws. 

These facts are easily noticed, and have been 
familiar to men from time immemorial. But 
careful observation, long watching, trained eyes, 
and most of all, a just theory and fine instru- 
ments, especially the telescope, have by degrees, 
but more especially within the last few years, 
added so much to our knowledge of the Moon 
that " the former things shall not be remembered 
nor come into mind." Let us notice some of the 
chief points of interest that have been discovered. 

Its light is not its own, but is the reflected 
light of the sun. If it were self-luminous it 
would, of course, always appear at the full. But 
it is not seen at all when the sun cannot shine 
on the face that is turned tow r ards us. When the 
sun comes to hold such a place that it can begin 
to shine on that side it begins to appear lumi- 
nous, and gradually the luminous surface enlarges 
as the position of the sun becomes more and more 

5 



62 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

favorable, until at last we have the full moon. 
Also, the spectroscope, which has found that each 
self-luminous body has its own peculiarity of 
light, finds that the light which comes to us from 
the moon is that of the sun. So the glory of the 
moon is a borrowed one. She is a great reflector. 
She borrows, but always forgets to return the 
most of what she borrows. In fact she returns 
only a very trifling percentage of it. But, like 
many other people, she is very liberal with what 
does not belong to her. She scatters it freely 
right and left. We get from her at the full thou- 
sands of times as much light as we get from all 
the stars together. But we pay her back "in her 
own coin" even more liberally — principal with 
twelve hundred per cent, interest. A part of 
this is the very light she sends to us — as we may 
see in the faint illumination of the moon's first 
quarter when the c ( old moon appears in the arms 
of the new." But most of the light we send 
comes to us directly from the sun. We also pay 
with what we have borrowed. So we cannot 
cast stones at our neighbor. 

The shape of the moon is globular, like that; 
of the earth. At the full it seems like a silver 
plate. Then it looks as if being eaten up by 
little and little of some invisible monster. We 
seem to see the ragged edge and the marks of 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 63 

his teeth ! At last all is gone. Only, however, 
to come again in a new crescent, and slowly wax 
to its former roundness. Notwithstanding this ap- 
parent variety of shapes or " phases" — crescent, 
half-circle, gibbous, full-circle — the moon really 
has but one shape, and that is such as the earth 
has, viz., that of a globe. Only a round body 
could show the "phases." And as we look at 
the face through a telescope, we notice that the 
central parts have that distincter look that be- 
longs to the central parts of a rounded surface. 

The telescope practically takes us very near 
the moon, and, especially with the help of pho- 
tography, enables us to make a map of it in some 
respects better than any map of the earth can 
be. Behold a tremendous Switzerland with vast 
chasms, walled plains, lofty mountains, enormous 
craters of what seem extinct volcanoes ! It is as 
if some madcap ocean, at the supreme moment of 
one of its wildest moods, had been suddenly stiff- 
ened into stone. What wild and savage grandeur 
of disorder, as if from some ancient battle and 
carnival of Titans and demons, as if from the 
Miltonic battle between the faithful and unfaith- 
ful angels ! 

" From their foundations loos'ning to and fro 
They plucked the sealed hills with all their load, 
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops 
Uplifting, bore them in their hands 



64 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Main promontories flung, which in the air 

Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed. 

So hills amid the air encountered hills, 

Hurled to and fro in jaculation dire." 

As we gaze, we feel face to face with another, 
though immensely rougher, earth. We see moun- 
tains worthy of such proper names as Tycho, 
Copernicus, Newton. We see great chasms and 
craters, with ragged, precipitous sides; such as 
volcanoes and earthquakes sometimes make in our 
ground. We see sunrises and sunsets among the 
hills — shadows of peaks and of mountain ranges 
that creep along lunar valleys, as the elevation 
of the sun varies, just as we see them creep along 
our terrestrial ones. We see at once that the 
height of many of these peaks, and the breadth 
of many of these craters and crevasses, are enor- 
mous when expressed in terms of the moon's 
apparent diameter; and as soon as we learn the 
real distance and size of the moon we can find 
that thirty-nine of the peaks are higher than 
Mont Blanc, and several of the craters more 
than fifty miles across, while one crater is more 
than twice that. What moonquakes there must 
have been in some far back time, in comparison 
with which the earthquakes that broke up and 
tossed about our strata and piled our Alps and 
Andes were mere child's play ! 

While thus we notice an earth-surface we also 




MAP OF THE MOON'S HEMISPHERE. 




A LUNAR MOUNTAIN. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 65 

notice the absence of some things that belong to 
onr earth. We see no signs of water, though we 
see what look like ancient sea-beds, and though, 
when our instruments were rude and our thoughts 
ruder, we thought we saw in the Moon's spots 
the waters themselves, and gave them names 
accordingly — as the Sea of Plenty, Lake of 
Dreams, Sea of Serenity, Lake of Death, Ocean 
of Tempests. No clouds have been detected, nor, 
indeed, any signs of an atmosphere to support' 
them. How this is to be reconciled with other 
appearances just mentioned is still an unsolved 
problem. Have the ancient waters retired be- 
neath the surface ? Have they gone into chem- 
ical unions and solids? Has the great Creator 
restored to nothing that which from nothing he 
took? Or are those seeming ancient sea-beds 
mere seemings ? As yet we cannot answer. 

Of course we are compelled to say that no 
beings constituted like men can exist in a world 
thai has neither air nor water. But that is not 
saying that the Moon has no inhabitants. Surely 
an infinite Being could produce living creatures 
that do not require to breathe and drink; and the 
extremely different conditions under which ani- 
mal life flourishes on the earth are very suggestive 
of the possibility of still wider ranges. 

The Moon never shows us but one face. From 



66 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

year to year we see the same objects on its sur- 
face, saving on a little of the margin. 

This is what has hitherto been done in the 
way of perusing with our telescopes the features 
of the Moon — not all, however, that has been 
daimed to be done. Some German astronomers at 
one time thought that they had caught glimpses 
of a town, of a fortress, of canals, and even of 
green pastures. But this is now more than dis- 
credited; it is ridiculed almost as freely as what 
is known as the " lunar hoax." When Sir John 
Herschel went to the Cape of Good Hope many 
years ago for astronomical purposes, there ap- 
peared in the journals what purported to be a 
letter from him giving account of certain great 
discoveries made by his new refractor from that 
favorable standpoint. u He had discovered on 
the surface of the Moon, in addition to many lar- 
ger objects, herds of winged men with ape-faces, 
and even shells and flowers." The story got 
large credence for a time — a very brief one — with 
the unscientific public, and then burst, as so many 
other bubbles called scientific have done and are 
likely to do. An unscrupulous wag had tested 
the credulity of mankind and found it to be im- 
mense. 

The Sun. A friend also. Does it not give 
us day and light us to our various employments 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 67 

and enjoyments? Does it not paint the landscape 
with all the glory of colors — greening the grass, 
flushing the rose, besnowing the lily? Does it 
not quicken the dull ground into fruits and grains 
and forests and flowers ? Does it not stir the air 
into breezes to fan our fevered brows, equalize 
temperatures, fill the sails of commerce, work 
stagnation into purity ? Is it not the indispensa- 
ble condition of all our physical comfort and even 
of all vegetable and animal life ? Without it the 
earth would be a benighted desert, a depopulated 
iceberg. Age after age (for who shall say how 
many thousand years ?) the old Sun has been glo- 
riously shining away at such goodly and friendly 
work, like the greater Sun who made it, never 
pausing a moment in its silent beneficence, how- 
ever provokingly treated, and visiting all nations 
and generations with the same impartial beam. 
And so all men have been wont to look upon and 
welcome it in its steadfast daily visits as a stead- 
fast friend, some even as a benevolent divinity. 

Among the latter one may almost class some 
scientists. Hear one of them. " The Sun is the 
life of the earth. It is the common origin, the 
inexhaustible source whence have been derived 
for millions of centuries past all terrestrial powers, 
all mechanical and physical energy, as well as 
the powers of all living creatures, both vegetables 



68 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

and animals. The solar heat is the final source 
of the force manifested by society. ' ' This is 
talking like a pagan and sun- worshipper. As 
one listens he would think the Sun to be the cre- 
ator and builder as well as governor of the world, 
instead of being the very serviceable brute friend 
which the Great Friend has set to work in our 
behalf and which our bodies could not well get 
along without. Far from us be such science. 
We call the Sun a warm friend and a very great 
one; but by such pictorial language we mean 
nothing more than that it is the indispensable 
instrument of vast comforts and blessings to us. 
So much is true. 

This notwithstanding some drawbacks. Let 
men not venture to turn naked eye on its glory: 
why should they be made blind, as some careless 
astronomers have been ? Do not with bare brow 
defy the summer noon: why shouldst thou fall by 
a sunstroke or rave with a fevered brain ? Parch- 
ings and scorchings and droughts, brazen skies 
and barren soils, are they not the occasional trou- 
bles that we fear and deplore and pray against? 
Yes, certainly there are drawbacks to this fervid, 
hot-headed friend of ours. But where are the 
friends without dangerous points and drawbacks? 
All our friends have a dangerous side to them — 
dangerous in proportion to their greatness and 




SOLAR CORONA, IN 1857 AND 1871. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 69 

power. Royal friends need to be dealt with after 
a manner of special carefulness. We must not 
abuse them, we must not trifle with them, else 
their harming will be as vast as their helping has 
been. 

A circular disk of insufferable splendor, having 
two apparent motions, like those of the Moon (one 
in common with all the stars and the other among 
the stars), and sometimes eclipsed partly or wholly 
by the Moon coming between us and it, this is 
about all the naked eye discovers or the ancients 
knew about the Sun. They had their conjec- 
tures. Some thought so splendid an object must 
be a leading divinity. They called him Helios 
or Apollo or Baal or Osiris, and worshipped him 
as the brother of the Moon. And those of wiser 
views knew absolutely nothing of the real form 
and nature of the great luminary which the vul- 
gar adored. Anaxagoras guessed that it is a mass 
of incandescent matter, and but for the eloquence 
of his friend Pericles would have lost his life for 
his boldness. As it was, he lost only his coun- 
try; no great loss, considering what an unreason-, 
able country it was. 

So it was till quite modern times. As soon as 
the telescope was invented, what had been thought 
a surface of uniform brightness was seen to be far 
otherwise. The whole face appeared mottled — 



JO CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

first by spots of special brightness now called 
faculcz, secondly by spots of special darkness. The 
latter are what are commonly called Sun-spots. 
Like the bright spots, they have every variety of 
form, and show on their margin a penumbra. 
When a telescope of still higher power is brought 
to bear on the face, it appears covered with pores 
or points less bright than the intervening spaces. 
In the immediate neighborhood of the dark spots 
the better glasses show a still more striking as- 
pect — multitudes of bright spots tending to a lin- 
ear arrangement. 

In a photograph of the Sun the central parts 
appear in relief, the margin relatively dim and 
foreshortened. It is plainly a globe whose picture 
we see — a globe some of whose parts are nearer to 
us by its whole semi-diameter than others. 

A little watching of this globe with a telescope 
shows that it is revolving on an axis. The dark 
spots and faculae are plainly in motion in a com- 
mon direction, and some of them maintain sub- 
stantial identity for months. The motion of these 
is equable, from west to east, and completes a cir- 
cuit in from twenty-five to twenty-eight days. It 
is most naturally accounted for by supposing that 
the Sun, like the Earth and the Moon, revolves 
on itself. 

Unlike the Earth and the Moon, it is a self- 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 71 

luminous globe. In all circumstances, when our 
atmosphere is without clouds, the Sun shows a 
full orb when above the horizon. Besides we 
know of no other luminous object to furnish the 
light by which it shines. Also, as before stated, 
reflected light has a different optical property from 
that which is original with the body from which 
it last comes, and this test applied to the Sun 
shows that it is self-luminous. 

It is but a step farther to the fact that this 
self-luminous globe is a globe on fire, and on fire 
after a most terrible fashion. We might guess as 
much from the heat it sends to us from so great a 
distance as it plainly is. But our spectroscopes 
put the matter beyond doubt. They find that the 
Sun gives the spectrum of a burning body. How 
great its heat must be can be inferred from the 
intensity of its light and heat at the surface of the 
Earth. The most vivid flames we can make ap- 
pear almost as so much blackness when interposed 
between us and the Sun. As to its heat, what it 
is at the equator on some sultry summer noon we 
know; and w r e know also that after leaving the 
Earth's atmosphere in going towards the Sun the 
heat directly radiated from it must increase as the 
square of the Sun's distance from us diminishes. 
But inasmuch as a very great change in the place 
of an observer on the earth makes no easily ap- 



72 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

preciable change in the place of the Sun in the 
sky we know that its distance from us must be 
very great, and, consequently, that the heat at its 
surface must be incomprehensibly enormous — 
some say four million degrees Fahrenheit, and 
all should say enough to turn the most refractory 
substances known to us into gases or vapors in- 
stantly, or to convert a globe of ice as large as the 
earth into steam in a few minutes; in short, thou- 
sands of times greater than any furnace ever sent 
forth, greater than the very lightning itself can 
furnish, whose flash across the Sun's face is ob- 
scuring. 

It is only a step farther to say that the Sun is 
a globe completely covered with a fiery ocean. 
Whether the globe is throughout liquid or gase- 
ous and vaporous is still a matter of dispute; but 
that the surface consists of mobile matter, incan- 
descent, and in a state of intense agitation, and 
sometimes of terrible storm, is admitted by all as- 
tronomers. The faculse and dark spots for the 
most part are incessantly changing in form and 
place, and sometimes a spot flies to pieces almost 
as a cake of ice does when cast on a rock. Un- 
der favorable conditions we can see at the edge of 
the disk a colored stratum with protuberances, 
giving mainly the spectrum of hydrogen, the pro- 
tuberances often becoming immense scarlet jets — 




■M 



W!§§^Sff^<~- . Y^f V V^ 

THE SOLAR PHOTOSPHERE.* SU. '-SPOTS. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 73 

sun-geysers; sometimes entirely detached from the 
body of the Sun, and sometimes rising above it 
more than one-third its whole apparent diameter, 
which will be seen to mean a matter of 300,000 
miles. Such facts, taken in connection with the 
vast heat of the Sun and the vast chemical actions 
necessarily going on amid its tremendous fires, 
warrant us in saying that never was earthly ocean 
or atmosphere so tossed into madness as is that 
solar ocean on which our eyes refuse to linger. 

The scarlet atmosphere of hydrogen is sur- 
rounded by still another atmosphere of far lighter 
and as yet unknown material, best seen in a total 
eclipse of the Sun. This is called the corona. 
The underlying colored region is called the chro- 
mosphere, while the disk as commonly seen is 
known as the photosphere. When the rays from 
the more effulgent photosphere are cut off by the 
moon the more attenuated and cooler envelopes 
become visible. Then for a few moments they 
become objects of intense study to astronomers — 
as yet not altogether satisfactory study so far as the 
corona is concerned. Its widely different aspects 
and conditions at different times embarrass both 
telescope and spectroscope. One might reasona- 
bly expect a large variety in these respects in an 
atmosphere resting on an ocean so turbulent and 
variable; but the variety is too great and peculiar 



74 



CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 



to be thus explained. ' The corona's spectrum of 
a single faint, greenish line crosses a faint contin- 
uous spectrum in which sometimes appear the ab- 
sorption lines of common sunlight. 

The spectrum of common sunlight is that of 
incandescent vapors and gases when shone through 
by a more heated solid, or liquid, or at least by 
denser and hotter matter, than themselves. Just 
what the solar vapors and gases are is found to 
some extent by comparing the spectra of known 
substances with the solar spectrum. Not only 
are hydrogen and helium found in this way in 
the atmosphere of the Sun, but also vapors of the 
following metals: 



Sodium, Manganese, Lead, 

Iron, Calcium, Palladium, 

Magnesium, Titanium, Strontium, 

Barium, Nickel, Cadmium, 

Copper, Cobalt, Aluminium, 

Uranium. 

A powerful spectroscope shows thousands of 
lines in the solar spectrum. Of these, less than 
900 have yet been referred to known substances. 
Are there many elements in the earth yet undis- 
covered, or is the Sun largely composed of different 
materials from the earth? If the latter supposi- 
tion is correct, the earth can hardly be a child of 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 75 

the Sun. Certainly some substances that enter 
largely into the composition of the earth (oxygen, 
for example, which makes up not far from half 
its substance) either are not found at all in the 
Sun or only in a slight degree. 

The study of the Sun's face has brought to 
light some points of sympathy with the earth as 
well as some points of divergence. The most 
spots occur w T hen the magnetic needle is most 
disturbed, when auroras are most striking, and 
when the electric currents are most powerful at 
the earth's surface. Between the greatest and 
least of all these there is a period of about eleven 
years. 

What are the spots? After long disputes 
they are now generally regarded as depressions in 
the tumultuous ocean of the photosphere. At 
the same time it would be too much to say that 
no difficulties remain to this theory. Perhaps it 
would be mended if combined with a fuller recog- 
nition of two facts, viz. , that of less bright clouds 
suspended over the fiery ocean and so showing 
darkly upon it, and that of relatively cold spots 
in the photosphere. Such spots must exist, must 
exist as depressions, must appear darker than other 
spots, must appear comparatively small and few 
at the edge of the disk and at its equator. The 
hotter and so the higher materials would be most 



76 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

drawn to the equator and so would occupy that 
region to the exclusion of the cooler elements. 

Some scientists have undertaken to tell us 
about how old the Sun is. One says about 300,- 
000,000 of years; another will not allow more 
than 18,000,000. Geologists are inclined to mag- 
nificent figures, their- estimates being from 30 to 
3, 000 times greater than those of astronomers. 
On this matter we profess great ignorance. Not 
having the nebular hypothesis, with a lapful of 
sub-hypotheses, to help us out, we must submit 
to the mortification of saying that we do not 
know, even roughly, how old the Sun is. We 
only know that it had a beginning, that 'this be- 
ginning was far back beyond that of the human 
race, and that when it began God was the be- 
ginner. 

Some scientists have undertaken to tell us 
about how long the fires of the Sun will last. No 
diminution of its light and heat has been noticed 
during the historic period; but it is nevertheless 
held by some that such a tremendous radiation as 
is incessantly going on must finally exhaust the 
supply, and the great orb hang black and frozen 
in the sky. That would mean awful catastrophe 
to us. We are concerned to know how soon we 
shall be frozen to death. And we are variously 
told that we may count on from 10,000,000 to 17,- 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 77 

000,000 of years longer. On this matter also we 
profess great ignorance. We do not know how 
long the Sun will last. We do not even know 
but that it will last for ever. Have we not been 
hearing for years of the conservation of force? 
We are by no means sure that the All- wise has not 
hidden away amid the great compensation cycles 
of nature some provision for returning to the Sun 
all the forces it so liberally expends, as he is wont 
to return to the liberal man all his generosity. 
But one thing we are sure of, namely, that when 
the world comes to an end it will not be by free- 
zing, but by conflagration. " The earth also, and 
the works that are therein, shall be burned up." 

Planets. From time out of mind five of the 
stars have been known to be unlike the rest in 
that they seem to wander aimlessly about the 
heavens. Hence the Greeks called them planets 
or wanderers. And the Romans gave to each of 
them the proper name by which it is now known, 
as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. 

I have said that astrologers have not been in 
the habit of viewing all the planets as friends. 
Jupiter and Venus were thought such; Mercury 
was thought friendly or otherwise according to 
circumstances; Mars and Saturn were dangerous. 
But we have recovered bravely from astrology as 
well as from alchemy, although in our newspa- 
6 



78 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

pers we often see advertisements that promise 
great things in behalf of both these mediaeval de- 
lusions, and that manage to gather a few dishon- 
est pennies from the ignorant. But to us of riper 
knowledge all the planets are equally friendly, if 
not equally serviceable and comely. Fair Venus, 
morning and evening star, vision of beauty, with 
its gentle and caressing ray; lordly Jupiter, with 
its calm, majestic, and patronizing shining — we 
had quite as lief be born under some other planet, 
say thieving Mercury or bloody Mars or canni- 
bal Saturn. It would be hard to show a single 
mischief any one of these has done us, while 
each has done something to help the heavens de- 
clare the glory of God and to illuminate the 
nights of the world. They are, as we shall find 
by-and-by, honored members of the same family, 
bound to us by such strong and close ties that 
they could not be removed without a catastrophe 
to us, unless a miracle should be wrought to pre- 
vent it. The fact that the old classical nations 
as well as others gave to them the names of their 
principal divinities, who were supposed to be 
closely related to one another, and in the main 
friendly to well-disposed people, shows that they 
w 7 ere regarded as friends. 

What did the ancients know about these five 
wandering stars? Scarcely anything, save that 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 79 

they wandered, some more, some less. Whether 
they were igiiesfatui, bred of some celestial swamp, 
or sky-tramps of the better sort, or like other stars, 
or like the earth, their naked eyes did not inform 
them ; and they had no other means of astronomi- 
cal knowledge save that of hypothesis, on which 
so much stress is now being laid, and which has 
so often brought science into contempt. Until 
quite lately these planets went abroad, like Eastern 
dames, with veiled faces, though their veils were of 
silver tissue that managed to shine marvellously. 

But the telescopic astronomer at length came 
to these shining incogs, that had for ages so jeal- 
ously covered up their faces from general obser- 
vation, and audaciously insisted on lifting the 
envious tissue. Lo, expanded orbs ! Lo, earth- 
like bodies with atmospheres and rotations ! In- 
stead of spangles on the sky or the bright eyes of 
far-away spirits or miniature bonfires in the festi- 
val-keeping heavens, they appeared round worlds 
of earth-like matter seemingly dwarfed by distance. 

Mercury, for the most part, hides under the 
shining robes of the sun, never going more than 
29 from it. But for a few moments before sun- 
rise and after sunset at certain seasons it comes 
out of hiding and under the revealing eye of the 
telescope. Then we see a small disk slightly 
tinged with red, having a diameter nearly three 



80 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

times greater at some times than at others, slight- 
ly flattened at two opposite points of the disk, 
covered with faint spots, some of which are seen 
moving across the face at right angles to a line 
joining the flattened parts and making a complete 
circuit in about twenty-four hours. We also see 
it passing through various phases like the moon ; 
and, as in the case of the moon, we see from the 
appearance of the broken edge that the surface of 
the planet is uneven, and, considering that it 
must be far from us, even mountainous. Some 
of these mountains are estimated to be eleven 
miles high. Sometimes the crescent-horns of the 
planet are seen extending till they meet each 
other and form a complete ring of light, which 
could not be unless the body possessed a refract- 
ing atmosphere. There seems to be evidence that 
this atmosphere is very<*Iense, and that it is filled 
with clouds so dense that nearly nine-tenths of 
the light falling on it fails to reach its solid sur- 
face. The spectrum of the planet also shows that 
these clouds consist, in part at least, of the vapor 
of water, from which we infer that, like our earth, 
the surface in part consists of seas. The unequal 
reflecting powers of different substances compo- 
sing the body of Mercury, the great inequalities of 
level, and the necessarily varying density of the 
cloudy envelope, sufficiently explain the spots. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 8l 

It ought to be said that the nearness of Mer- 
cury to the sun so embarrasses observation that 
many astronomers have not been able personally 
to verify some of the above facts, and so hold them 
in doubt. But they all, after the planetary anal- 
ogies and the names of Schroter, Messier, and Le- 
monnier, deserve some respect. 

Venus appears before the telescope with va- 
rious phases and sizes similar to those of Mercury. 
Its apparent diameter is more than six times 
greater at some times than at others. Like Mer- 
cury, it is sometimes seen as a black marble, with 
a border, crossing the face of the sun — the famous 
crossing known as the Transit of Venus. Like 
Mercury, this planet never goes very far from 
the sun, though farther than Mercury. Great as 
are the beauty and brightness of Venus to the 
naked eye, they are far greater under the tele- 
scope. Hesperus and Phosphor, morning and 
evening star, once thought two different bodies, 
are now easily seen to be one, as easily as we rec- 
ognize the same man in different places. The 
same phenomena as in the case of Mercury, if 
Schroter may be trusted, show that Venus has 
air and water and clouds and day and night about 
as long as our own, and great mountains, some 
of which bear a very considerable proportion in 
height to the diameter of the planet. Its atmos- 



8z CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

pliere seems denser than our own. In general, 
however, Venus much resembles the earth. 

But Mars seems to resemble the earth still 
more. It has within a few years been found to 
have moons. At a time when it was much more 
favorably situated for observation than it had been 
for a long time an American astronomer saw two 
points of light in the immediate neighborhood of 
the planet which soon showed their true charac- 
ter. They kept constantly moving from one side 
of it to the other. So w r e are sure they are moons. 
We are not quite so sure that the names given 
these moons, Phobos and Deimos (panic and ter- 
ror), are not a little too formidable for the tiny 
strangers, unless, indeed, reference was had in the 
naming to the consternation into which one of 
them has thrown the nebular hypothesis by going 
around the planet in less than one-third of its ro- 
tation period. 

For Mars rotates. By watching the stabler 
markings on its face we find them completing a 
revolution in about one of our days. And in a 
common telescope we see many such markings. 
We seem to see seas, islands, continents ; and on 
the continental, or lighter parts, that various 
shading which would naturally come from vari- 
ety of level and configuration. Doubtless the 
planet has lowlands and highlands, valleys and 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 83 

mountains, along which course rivulets and riv- 
ers to the seas. For the same tests that show us 
air, vapor of water, rapidly changing mists and 
clouds, and so rains and winds and storms, in 
Venus, show them in Mars. But what is that 
round white spot near the edge of the disk ? As 
it is found matched by another on just the opposite 
side of the planet, and as these spots are found to 
occupy the poles of the planet, and also to slowly 
waste away as the Martial summer advances, and 
increase again as its winter comes on, it is cer- 
tainly snow that we see. 

But there are still better views of Mars. Its 
apparent diameter is about seven times greater 
at some times than at others. When it is nearest 
to us, and great telescopic power is brought to 
bear on it and it is closely watched for a consid- 
erable time, astronomers have succeeded in ma- 
king quite a detailed chart of its surface. On this 
chart both hemispheres of the planet are shown, 
with water and land in their various places and 
proportions, but without any attempt to represent 
the inequalities of surface, though with a very 
manifest attempt to immortalize the names of 
certain astronomers who have figured more or 
less in connection w T ith the planet. Why this 
ruddy hue that is given to the land ? This is the 
tint it has even to the naked eye, and this is 



84 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

doubtless the reason why it received from the 
ancients the name of their god of war and blood. 
As this hue is confined to the land, it is credibly 
supposed to be due to the color of the soil, though 
thought by some to be due to the same causes as 
give us ruddy sunsets. 

Is there no vegetation to be nourished by the 
soils and rains and streams of Mars ; no animal 
to feed along its pastures, swim in its seas, or fly 
through its air ; no superior race to enjoy its fine 
landscapes, its day and night, its grateful change 
of seasons, and its double moon? 

Jupiter makes an imposing show to the 
naked eye. We hardly wonder as we gaze on 
its splendor that the Romans gave it the name 
of the king of their gods. But under the tele- 
scope the king is still more kingly. Is not the 
vertical diameter considerably shorter than the 
horizontal? Actual measurement shows that one 
is to the other as 16 is to 17. This difference 
leads us to suspect that Jupiter revolves at a very 
rapid rate on its shorter diameter. By watching 
certain of the more constant features of the disk, 
and especially a notable red spot that did not 
shift its position for years, it was found that the 
suspicion was justified and that the planet ro- 
tates in a period of about ten hours, in a plane 
that nearly passes through the sun, and so gives 




JUPITER. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 85 

nearly equal days and nights of five hours each 
all over its surface. 

It is also found that the colored belts seen 
crossing the face are generally parallel to the 
plane of rotation. What are these belts ? They 
are seen to undergo great and rapid changes in 
place, shape, size, and color. Hence it is gen- 
erally supposed that they are clouds and cur- 
rents drawn into parallelism with the planet's 
equator by its very rapid rotation. But why such 
immense and permanent accumulations of clouds, 
and why such great and rapid changes in form, 
place, and color? Astronomers generally sup- 
pose the cause to be an extremely heated condi- 
tion of the body of the planet, raising a vast 
quantity of vapors and gases into the atmosphere, 
and variously changing them according to the 
various changes in the place, activity, and pro- 
ducts of the heat-centres. This seems reasonable. 
Still the body of Jupiter cannot be incandescent; 
for its spectrum is that of reflected sunlight. It 
may, however, be exceptionally heated without 
being incandescent. It may now be in the state 
in which both geology and the Scriptures show 
that the earth once was— at once exceedingly 
humid and heated and so densely veiled in 
clouds; it may have special centres of heat and 
so of atmospheric disturbance; also the atmos- 



86 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

phere itself may be very dense and peculiar in 
its constitution, as well as variously charged at 
different times and places with moisture and 
other outside material, and so vast masses of 
variously colored and changeful clouds, such as 
we often see at sunsets and in droughts, may 
easily result. If this is the true explanation of 
the belts of Jupiter, the nebular hypothesis in its 
earlier form has another difficulty to explain, 
viz. , how one of the first formed planets has not 
cooled down as much as vastly later ones. 

This difficulty has seemed insuperable to 
many evolutionists. Accordingly Spencer and 
others, giving up the original form of the hy- 
pothesis, suggest another which supposes that a 
comparatively cool mass of extremely diffused 
gases and vapors in rotating broke up into sev- 
eral thin concentric rings at about the same time, 
and that the interior rings graduated into worlds 
sooner than the exterior. But this view is 
weighted with special difficulties of its own — as 
may be noticed elsewhere. It is not the easiest 
thing in the world to conceive how a rotating 
body can throw off several rings at about the 
same time, or how the hottest of these rings 
could cool off into a habitable world some mil- 
lions of years in advance of the coldest. 

But the most interesting: fact connected with 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 87 

Jupiter, and the very first revealed by the tele- 
scope, is the fact that the planet has a family of 
four bright stars revolving- about it. They ap- 
proach it, cross its face, pass beyond a little way, 
then return, disappear behind it, reappear, and go 
on to the first position. They are evidently satel- 
lites, moons — very small in comparison with their 
primary. The nearest completes a circuit in 
forty-two hours; the most remote in about two 
weeks; the others in times between these. They 
resemble our moon also in that each rotates and 
completes a rotation in the same time in which 
it circles about the planet. An opera-glass will 
show them. By means of these satellites the 
velocity of light was first discovered; and this 
discovery was so brilliant and useful that we 
shall always be thankful to the little ones whose 
"hide and seek" about their illustrious father 
gave it to us, though we now have more accurate 
sources of information. 

Though not very brilliant to the naked eye, 
Saturn was known from the earliest times, not 
only as a w r anderer, but as one that, like Jupiter 
and Mars, wandered away from the sun by the 
w T hole breadth of the sky. But as to the features 
of old Chronos — none knew anything of them till 
the telescope with its great, calm eye shot search- 
ing and persistent gaze upon it. That gaze re- 



88 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

vealed a mottled orb revolving on itself in about 
twelve hours, crossed by permanent yet change- 
able belts parallel to its plane of rotation, after 
the manner of Jupiter, and arguing, as is sup- 
posed, the same physical condition with that 
planet as to exceeding heat and moisture; re- 
vealed also that the* axis of rotation is consider- 
ably inclined to a line joining Saturn with the 
sun, and consequently causes at any given point 
on its surface unequal days and nights. 

But the chief interest of Saturn lies in its ring 
and great family of eight moons. The discovery 
of the ring made a great stir among astronomers, 
and much speculation, which has hardly yet set- 
tled into science. When first seen by Galileo 
the ring was in such a position that it seemed 
two handles, as it were, to the planet; but, in 
course of time, it came to be seen as shown else- 
where. We see that the ring appears multiple, 
is parallel with the belts, which are themselves 
found parallel with the plane of rotation. It is 
sometimes edgewise to us and then is not seen at 
all; so that its thickness must be very small com- 
pared with its width — not more than 50 or 100 
miles. Indeed, the innermost ring of all is so 
thin as to be transparent. What is this strange 
appendage? It is thought that the observations 
are best satisfied by supposing that it consists of 




SATURN AND ITS RINGS. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 89 

many thin concentric zones of minnte, discrete, 
aeriform bodies, almost like flakes of snow, cir- 
culating about the planet — crowded in some parts 
and comparatively diffuse in others, and at any 
given point varying much in aspect from changes 
in the density of the zone at that point. If this 
hypothesis is correct— if the ring is really a series 
of concentric disks whose thickness in compar- 
ison with their breadth is nearly inappreciable, 
and the innermost ring the least dense of all, we 
have other embarrassments to the nebular hy- 
pothesis in whatever form — in addition to that 
which the original form has — in that the aspects 
of Saturn, like those of Jupiter, seem to show that 
it is vastly less advanced than the earth was 
millions of years ago. It is hard to see how disks 
of such thinness could be thrown off by a rotating 
planet under any circumstances, especially by a 
planet whose rotation-period even now is about 
ten hours; or how, when once thrown off, it could 
divide up its continuous cloudy material into 
myriads of separate flakes, and gradually thin 
out, from such a figure as one would get by cut- 
ting off from the equatorial regions of the planet 
enough to leave it a perfect globe, to such ex- 
treme and filmy thinness and even transparency 
as we observe. 

Time out of mind have appeared in the sky 



90 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

certain objects which from their hairy aspect have 
been called comets. These bodies, so far from be- 
ing viewed as friends, have generally been regarded 
with alarm, and often with terror. They meant 
public disaster. Famine, pestilence, war, all 
sorts of wide-spread ruin, were supposed to be 
presaged by them. It was not known what their 
constitution was or what laws governed them. 

An object very unlike any other in the whole 
sky was suddenly noticed. It had a roundish 
head in which sometimes appeared a nucleus; 
and generally, streaming away from this in a 
direction opposite the sun, a tail or tails of ex- 
tremely varying form and size, sometimes mere 
zero, and sometimes stretching over a third of the 
heavens. After waxing for a time in size and 
brightness it gradually waned, and in a short time 
had disappeared altogether. Where has it gone ? 
Will it ever reappear ? i ( Let us hope not, ' ' said 
the ancient public; u let us hope not, thou proph- 
et of evil, thou bird of ill-omen, thou terror of the 
nations, thou enemy of mankind." 

But we have gradually come to pleasanter views 
of things. Comets were found quite as apt to fore- 
run prosperities as adversities. The public now 
gazes on one with great self-possession. Even 
little children never turn pale as they look up at 
the spectral visitor. And astronomers joyfully 




1 AND 5 HALLEY'S COMET AT DIFFERENT TIMES. 

2 AND 3 DONATl'S COMET AT DIFFERENT TIMES. 

4 COMET OF 1843. 



TRANSFORMATIONS. $ I 

welcome him — the bigger and fiercer-looking the 
better. They push out their telescopes from a 
hundred watch-towers, study every feature with 
great interest, tell how long it has been since his 
last visit, ask when he will come again. They 
are not afraid of him, know of no harm that he 
or his comrades have done, think him a pleasant 
variety in the celestial scenery, know that he 
has already brought us valuable news from far- 
distant regions, and hope that some day, mighty 
traveller as he is ; he will bring us still more. 
From behind no one of the thousand telescopes 
levelled at him beams an unwelcoming eye. 

And the following facts have been learned. 
Comets consist of gaseous matter, sometimes so 
extremely diffused that faint stars can be seen 
through their densest parts. As they approach 
the sun they naturally brighten and expand with 
the increasing heat; then they recede in these 
respects as they recede from the sun. As to the 
elements composing them, the spectroscope has 
examined several and found that they consist each 
of a single element; that in the case of at least two 
the elements are such as have not yet been recog- 
nised as terrestrial, and that of two others, one 
consists of nitrogen and the other of carbon. It 
is also generally conceded by evolutionists that 
the comets cannot be regarded as children of the 



92 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

sun by natural genesis, as their more solid fellow- 
wanderers have been credited with being. 

That these occasional ghostly visitors serve 
some valuable purpose in the economy of the 
heavens we are bound to believe. But what that 
is as yet baffles our science. If " all things come 
to him who waits, " this will come among them. 

OTHER bodies. The ancients noticed occa- 
sional meteorites and meteors — the first being fire- 
balls moving near the earth, and sooner or later 
reaching it, commonly after the explosion; the 
second being what are familiarly known as shoot- 
ing stars. 

Notwithstanding the alarm sometimes excited 
by the sudden appearance and detonations of 
meteorites, intelligent men are always glad to 
know of them and to get specimens for their 
museums. When examined microscopically and 
chemically these specimens are all found to con- 
sist of like materials, though differently combined, 
vis., iron and some compounds of silica with 
various metals and other substances. The struc- 
ture sefcms to indicate an original state of fusion, 
and as some think even of gas. Did they come 
from the glowing furnaces which we know to 
exist in the bowels of the earth, and which some- 
times take voice in earthquakes and volcanoes? 
The elements are all such as belong to the earth ; 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 93 

and though they are not found at the surface in 
the same combinations, in the great crucibles and 
under the immense pressures of the interior there 
is abundant explanation of all things possible to 
heat and condensation. This explanation may suf- 
suffice for some fire-balls that have been noticed. 
But there are others for which it will not suffice. 
Often when first observed they are some 80 or 90 
miles above the earth and moving obliquely to- 
wards it, which is inconsistent with the idea that 
they do not come from without our atmosphere. 
At present astronomers are agreed that in general 
both meteorites and meteors are extra-terrene 
bodies; that they are of substantially th'e same 
material, as shown by their spectra; and that me- 
teors, especially the meteoric showers in April, 
August, and November, are nearly related to com- 
ets, and move in clouds about the sun. 

Each of the familiar celestial objects just de- 
scribed (earth, moon, sun, five planets, comets, 
etc.) appears so different to us from what it did 
to the ancients that it may be said to have been 
transformed by modern research. And they have 
also been transformed collectively as well as in- 
dividually. What were once supposed to have 
no closer relation to us and to one another than 
have the other heavenly bodies, are now known 
to be relatively our neighbors. This is inferable 
7 



94 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

from the fact that their apparent motions greatly 
exceed all others in the sky. They must be com- 
paratively near ns. A far greater space must 
part them from the other stars than parts them 
from us and from one another. We are a family 
wholly by ourselves. 

And this celestial family has been gradually 
transformed in another respect — in respect to ap- 
parent size. The few ancient "wanderers" have 
become many modern ones. During the last cen- 
tury hundreds have been added to our list, nota- 
bly Uranus and Neptune, the former with four 
moons, and the latter with one; the former visi- 
ble to the naked eye as a faint star, and the latter 
visible only to the telescope. The discovery of 
these new planets created great surprise. All the 
others just mentioned had been known for thou- 
sands of years. It was even maintained by the 
astronomical fathers that there could be no more. 
Did not the sun, moon, and five planets complete 
the sacred number seven ? That was conclusive. 
So when Herschel, in 1781, detected a small green- 
ish disk lurking among stars of the sixth magni- 
tude, and moving about in a small way, a thrill 
of astonishment and enthusiasm ran through the 
whole scientific world. But still greater and 
wider enthusiasm was felt when, in 1846, Nep- 
tune was discovered. This because of the man- 



TRANSFORMATIONS. 95 

ner of its discovery. The motions of Uranus 
were found disturbed. Where must a new planet 
have been and now be to produce this disturb- 
ance ? Two astronomers suggested a place in the 
sky. The telescope was pointed to it, and lo, 
Neptune! 

In addition to these, considerably more than 
two hundred faint planets have been found nest- 
ling in our group. Though plainly neighbors, 
and much nearer than some of the other plan- 
ets — as is shown by their much greater apparent 
motion — none of them show sensible disks under 
the largest telescopes. It follows that they are 
comparatively small objects. Accordingly they 
have been called planetoids or asteroids. Proper 
names, however, have been given to all of them. 

Thus certain of the most familiar objects in 
the old-time heavens have in the course of mod- 
ern research been transformed both individually 
and collectively. The features of each have been 
read after a manner that would have astonished 
the ancients; they have all been found neighbors 
to one another as compared with the fixed stars; 
and this neighborhood has been found shared by 
many associates whose very existence until lately 
was quite unsuspected. So we have what is 
known as THE SOLAR SYSTEM. 



V. NUMBERS. 



1. NEW NEIGHBORS. 

2. DOUBLE AND MULTIPLE STARS. 

3. MILKY WAY. 

4. OTHER GALAXIES. 



NUMBERS. 99 



V. NUMBERS. 

Astronomical instruments have done much 
more than enlarge our acquaintance with certain 
celestial objects already familiar. They have 
drawn aside a veil and revealed to us a host of 
objects in the sky which until lately never met 
the gaze of the sharpest eyes. 

A vague look at the heavens has always given 
the impression of almost innumerable stars. But 
actual count with the naked eye individualizes 
only about 5,000 in both hemispheres. When, 
however, we bring a telescope of even a low 
power to bear heavenward we discover objects 
that during all the past have been total strangers 
to men; and, as we increase our optical powers, 
the few golden seeds scattered over the sky-fields 
gradually ripen into a harvest that is absolutely 
amazing. 

First, as we have seen, we discover an addi- 
tion of some hundreds to that family of neighbor 
orbs to which we belong, and which, out of def- 
erence to the brightest object among them, we 
have called the solar system. As about half a 
score of new asteroids have been found annually 



IOO CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

for now many years, we are entitled to expect that 
more will be found. 

Turning now a telescope on the fixed stars, we 
find some that appear single to the naked eye be* 
coming double, triple, quadruple, sextuple. One, 
Theta Orionis ) is found to consist of seven stars. 
About 6,000 of these multiple objects have been 
noticed. What seemed a small group turns out 
to be a cluster of scores or hundreds or thousands. 
Thus the six or seven stars commonly noticed in 
the Pleiades become sixty or more, and yonder 
white spot, about one-tenth the apparent si^e of 
the moon, becomes the famous cluster in Hercu- 
les, with, perhaps, 30,000 stars. Vacant spaces 
become populous, one star becomes many, groups 
become clusters, small clusters become shining 
armies, the Milky Way — and what of the Milky 
Way? What is that luminous or sub-luminous 
cloud that belts our heavens? The unaided eye 
has no answer ready, whatever the imagination 
may suspect. But look into a certain mammoth 
reflector and you will find the riddle of the ages 
read out loudly into your vernacular, as you see 
some 18,000,000 of distinct stars, instead of the 
milk which baby Hercules spilled of old or the 
ce!estial snow-banks of a moment ago. 

The telescope notices, mostly in a zone at 
right angles to the Milky Way and about its 



NUMBERS. IOI 

poles, not far from 6,000 cloud-like objects, hence 
called nebula. They are of all apparent sizes, 
from a diameter of twenty degrees downwards. 
Sometimes they are far apart — lone islands in 
great oceans of space, and sometimes, like the 
stars, they are gathered into neighborhoods of 
two, three, or more. Huge archipelagos of them 
are found in the constellation Virgo. As to shape 
there is very great variety. Some are circular, 
some oval, some annular, and some consist of con- 
centric rings. One resembles a crab, another a 
dumb-bell, still another an hour-glass. There 
are fans and spirals and whirlpools, plumes, ban- 
ners, and swords. Some have a uniform bright- 
ness throughout, others are spotted with nuclei, 
others fade away gradually from centre to out- 
skirts, while still others have ragged, vacant 
patches within; in short, they differ among them- 
selves in form and aspect almost as do the clouds 
of our atmosphere. What are they ? 

By far the greater part of these faint celestial 
mists and snows have been resolved into stars. 
If these resolved nebulae are other Milky Ways, 
as astronomers commonly suppose, and if each of 
them has on the average as large a stellar census 
as the Milky Way, we have within reach of our 
telescopes not far from 100,000 millions of stars. 
And each of these stars, as we shall see further 



103 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

on, implies many invisible bodies in its neighbor- 
hood, such as we know under the name of plan- 
ets. What a sum total ! 

But is this all? Have the heavens given any 
sign of coming exhaustion as we have swept into 
them deeper and deeper with our expanding re- 
fractors and reflectors ? We have now passed from 
an eye of one-quarter-inch diameter to one of 72 
inches by, say a hundred, successive enlarge- 
ments, and each enlargement up to the present 
has not only brought into view new stars, but has 
proved as rich a discoverer as its immediate pred- 
ecessor. Of course we are courageous as to the 
future. We confidently expect that the past will 
repeat itself. Does the universe come to an end 
just at the point where our present glasses happen 
to fail us ? We will not be so unphilosophic as 
to say, Yes. It is vastly probable that we need 
to make a vast addition to the magnificent total 
of stars actually seen by our telescopes, giving a 
whole that is wonderful, confounding, and prac- 
tically infinite to us. Never hunting-grounds so 
rich in game as those vast preserves on high 
w T here the telescope is the mighty Nimrod. Nev- 
er deeps turning out such net -breaking multi- 
tudes as those deeps and heights over our heads 
into which our telescopic net has swept a little 
here and there and come out almost broken with 



NUMBERS. IO3 

its shining freight. Never in all our populous 
Indias and Chinas such a census as the astrono- 
mer can safely forecast after having looked over 
only a small part of that grand cerulean empire 
whose frontiers are far beyond the eye of the lar- 
gest telescope. Yes, practically infinite is the 
number of the stars. What our glasses have yet 
discovered are merely the outposts of unseen ar- 
mies that defy computation. 

But we are not allowed to stop even here. 
What if the practical infinity is absolute infinity? 
We are bound to take into account the possibility 
that infinite space contains an absolutely infinite 
population of stars. Who is in a condition to 
deny this ? It is demonstrable, as Sir John Her- 
schel has shown, that while an infinite number of 
stars sown at hap-hazard through space would 
give a milky aspect to the whole heavens, such 
would not be the effect if they are arranged in 
certain conceivable systems — in fact, in such sys- 
tems as actually exist. The general sky would 
appear as it does now, though the endless room 
has endless occupancy. But what does an abso- 
lute infinity of stars mean? Set down a figure — 
say 9. Now annex to this another like figure, 
and to this another still, and so on, figure after 
figure, till you have hundreds, thousands, mil- 
lions, billions, trillions of them; keep on doing 



104 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

this till you have worn away years, lifetimes, the 
lives of nations and dispensations and worlds, in 
industrious and unintermitted figure - making, ; 
keep on doing it till you have a line of figures so 
long that the fleetest angel that ever shook tem- 
pestuous wing across the spaces could not fly over 
its whole length in all his immortal years, and let 
such a line stand for a mere suggestion of the infi- 
nite stars. 

1 ' So many as the stars of the sky in multitude 
and as the sands on the seashore innumerable." 
The sands on all shores would be a terrible task 
to an accountant. Whoever should set himself to 
count the leaves of all lands "when summer is 
green or when autumn has blown ' ' would be as 
much of a madman or a fool as one would care to 
see. Even the animals of the world, great and 
small, so crowd in their millions on air and water 
and land, and even into the deep foundations of 
the earth (does not a cubic inch of Bilin polish- 
ing-slate contain the silicious shells of 40,000,000 
of Galeonellae ?), that an invitation to name or 
even to count all their individuals would almost 
seem an invitation to become God. Such quite 
would be an invitation to count the number of 
the stars — certain, probable, and possible. Om- 
niscience alone suffices for such a task. "He 
telleth the number of the stars ; he calleth them 



NUMBERS. 105 

all by their names. 5 ' Cyrus the elder is said to 
have known each soldier in his army by name. 
We are not told how large his army was; but this 
we know, that if it numbered a few hundred thou- 
sands the story is absurdly incredible. But it is 
not incredible that the Infinite should compre- 
hend the infinite, that the Great King who made 
and owns and marshals all the starry armies 
should have a minute acquaintance with every 
single individual among them, though sown as 
thickly through all the immensities as are fire- 
flies through a summer's eve or as wheat-seeds 
on the banks of the Euxine. 

So the telescope deserves to be called the Co- 
lumbus of the heavens, for, like the other Tuscan, 
it is a very great discoverer. 

So the telescope is like the c c Great Eastern, ' ' for 
it carries cables of communication across oceans, 
joins us in knowledge and sympathy with count- 
less regions beyond, and gives us nightly the priv- 
ilege of communing with them, though at some- 
thing less than a dollar a word. 

So the telescope is not wholly like the famous 
* i Challengers ' ' which of late years have gone 
dredging through our w r atery deeps with such suc- 
cess that we are not without hope that the time is 
not far distant when our whole sea-bottom will 
have reasonably well given up its secrets. The sky 



106 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

is a deeper deep and a wider, so deep and wide that 
we are quite hopeless that we will ever touch bot- 
tom as our telescopes go sounding along the celes- 
tial abysses. But they have brought up from the 
shallower depths of that great azure ocean so 
many shining things as tax beyond measure our 
powers of numeration, and tell of inexhaustible 
riches awaiting longer lines and heavier plum- 
mets and a grander courage. 



VI. DISTANCES* 



1. APPARENT. 

2. LUNAR AND SOLAR, 

3. PLANETARY. 

4. STELLAR. 

5. ULTIMATE TELESCOPIC 

6. ULTIMATE. 



DISTANCES. 109 



VI. DISTANCES. 

IF a child is taken out under the evening sky 
and asked how far away he thinks the heavenly 
bodies to be, he is not unlikely to say that they 
are all at about the same distance from him, and 
that not a very great one — say the distance of 
yonder house or hill. Those astronomical chil- 
dren whom we call the ancients generally took 
the same view. The Latin and Greek poets con- 
ceived of the summit of Olympus in Thessaly as 
being above the stars, and that, consequently, 
the gods in descending to the earth had to pass 
by the stars. And, till within a few hundred 
years, even the scholars of the world have held 
that the astronomical distances, though differing 
somewhat, are all of them quite inconsiderable. 
And by far the larger part of mankind still take 
the same view. 

The friends of Job were not remarkable for 
just views of things. But one of them was very 
correct when he exclaimed, Behold the stars, how 
high they are ! We can tell the real heights, that 
is, the real distances, of the moon and sun from 
us by noticing how much they are displaced on 



IIO CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

the sky by a given change of place on our pait. 
In this way we find that the moon is a matter of 
240,000 miles away. To a man accustomed to 
measure his work by a two-foot rule, and who 
steps at the rate of three miles an hour, this dis- 
tance is something embarrassing even to the con- 
ception. But when a like process gives us about 
91,000,000 of miles as the distance of the sun 
from us, we begin to think lightly of lunar dis- 
tances, and to feel the necessity for larger units 
of measure than miles to help our thought to 
travel intelligently across such immense spaces. 
Think of the lifetimes that would have to be 
consumed in travelling to the sun by any vehi- 
cles known to us ! 

Knowing the distance of the sun from the 
earth, we can find the distances of two other plan- 
ets, Mercury and Venus, from the sun, as well 
as from ourselves, by simply noticing their great- 
est angular distances from that body. These dis- 
tances, as well as those of all the other planets, 
may also be found by the method of parallax that 
is used for the sun and moon, also by observing 
the daily apparent motions of the planets and re- 
ducing them to what they would be as viewed 
from the sun. The simplest trigonometry suffices 
for an approximation, though the most difficult 
mathematics are needed for great accuracy. No- 




COMPARATIVE SIZE OF THE SUN AS SEEN FROM DIFFERENT PLANETS. 




PHASES OF VENUS FOR ONE YEAR. 



DISTANCES. Ill 

tice the distances of the chief planets from the 
snn — roughly approximate : 





Miles. 




Miles. 


Mercury, 


35,000,000 


Jupiter, 


476,000,000 


Venus, 


66,000,000 


Saturn, 


872,000,000 


Earth, 


91,000,000 


Uranus, 


1,752,000,000 


Mars, 


139,000,000 


Neptune, 


2,746,000,000 



All the asteroids are situated between Mars 
and Jupiter at an average distance from the sun 
of 260,000,000 of miles. How happened it that 
every nebulous zone cast off from the sun, with a 
single exception, settled into one orb, while that 
between Mars and Jupiter settled into several 
hundreds ? 

Of course the distances of the other planets from 
the earth, though numerically different from those 
just given, are of the same general order of mag- 
nitude. 

Thus far we have been ascending a ladder, 
and at each step have come to a wider outlook on 
the great spaces of the creation. Can we mount 
still higher and see still farther ? What of the 
fixed stqjs, so called ? How far from us are they? 

It was not till quite lately that the beginning 
of an answer could be given to this question. 
But by noting with extreme care the places of 
certain stars at an interval of six months (that is 
at points 180 millions of miles apart) we have 



112 CELESTIAL EMPIRES 

found minute changes of position which, when 
combined with our distance from the sun, give 
approximately their distances from it and us. 
More than twenty stars have thus been made to 
report themselves. See some of the astonishing 



gures : 






Alpha Centauri 


, 224,000 sun 


distances 


61 Cygni, 


366,000 


(< 


i83oGroombrid 


ge, 912,000 


u 


70 Ophiuchi, 


. 1,286,000 


cc 


Vega, . . . 


• ^337,ooo 


cc 


Sirius, . . . 


• i,375,ooo 


cc 


Arcturus, . . 


. 1,624,000 


cc 


Polaris, . . 


• 3,078,000 


cc 


Capella, . . 


. 4,484,000 


cc 



Not one of the fixed stars thus far heard from 
is away from us less then 200,000 times 91 mil- 
lions of miles. 

In the foregoing list Polaris is the most inter- 
esting object, though neither the brightest nor 
the most remote. Ever since men began they 
have been guiding their wanderings on sea and 
land by the North Star. And little aware have 
the travellers been that they were being guided 
by light which had come for that purpose across 
so vast an interval. Most of them would have 
been sure that an average steam-car rate of mo- 



DISTANCES. 113 

tion would bring them to the star in a short time. 
Suppose one to set out. He goes on a straight 
line, goes night and day without stopping, goes 
at the rate of 20 miles an hour for 500 years. At 
the end of this time he has accomplished one sun- 
distance, one stage in his journey, and yet as he 
looks there is no perceptible increase of light in 
the star. This is discouraging. But, after all, 
what are 500 years to an immortal ? So he plucks 
up heart and starts again. This time he goes 
steadily on for a period equal to the whole past of 
our race on the earth. Six thousand years of in- 
cessant rush are at last behind him, and he stops 
again to take account of progress. He looks at 
the star. It has still no sensible diameter, and it 
would be hard to say that it is even a thought 
brighter than it was of old. It is still a star of 
the third magnitude. Shall he go on ? He hesi- 
tates. He thinks he does well to hesitate. Thir- 
teen milestones have been passed; but then more 
than three million others remain. Evidently, 
he has hardly made a beginning. Evidently, no 
impression worth mentioning is yet made on the 
mighty interval he has undertaken to wear away. 
Why, at such a rate of progress it will take more 
than 1,500 millions of years still to reach the 
goal. Can even an immortal afford such an out- 
lay ? Fifteen hundred millions of years ! Fancy 



114 CEU5STIAI, EMPIRES. 

tires at the very idea. ( l No, it cannot be afforded. 
Unless lie can have a far swifter vehicle than he 
has been using, unless the light itself can be per- 
suaded to be his steed, or some angel, such as ever 
and anon shoots by him, will be kind enough to 
take him on his wings, he must give up the 
undertaking." We applaud his decision. But 
there is yet another round to our upward-going 
ladder. Unless we suppose that all the larger 
stars lie nearest to us (which is not to be supposed), 
we must admit that the average size of the 5,000 
stars visible to the naked eye is probably not 
much different from that of the next 5,000 brought 
into view by some telescope, or any other 5,000 
brought into view by successive enlargements of 
the telescopic power until we have an instrument 
commanding a stellar population of some 18,000,- 
000. It follows that the average brightness to 
us of these successive strata of stars depends sole- 
ly on their distance from us, according to the 
w r ell-known law that the brightness of an object 
diminishes as the square of its distance from the 
observer increases. But the nearest star, Alpha 
Centauri, if carried away from us so far as to be 
only equally bright in our largest telescope, would 
be about 25,000,000 times farther from us than it 
now is, and in order to be just visible in that 
telescope would have to be much farther away. 



DISTANCES. 115 

But there are thousands of stars just brought into 
view by the great Rossian reflector. Now Alpha 
Centauri, as we have seen, is nearly four years 
from us as flies the light. Think of stars so 
distant that their light has been more than 75,- 
000,000 of years in coming to us, though travel- 
ling without intermission at the rate of 186,000 
miles a second! 

But there must be stars still more distant; for 
as, up to the present, each successive enlarge- 
ment of the telescope has brought new stars into 
view without any sign of their number being ex- 
hausted or abated, we are authorised to expect 
that further enlargement will give further discov- 
eries. And where is the final frontier and last 
picket of the heavenly host ? It is plain to every 
astronomer that his thought is summoned away 
to stars posted amazing stretches beyond the pres- 
ent boundaries of vision, however grandly helped 
that vision is by optical art. Indeed, as space is 
absolutely infinite, who can say that there is any 
last star, any bright point where our jaded thought 
can fold its wing and say, " Ah, what a mighty 
travel it has been ! but it is finished at last. All 
nature is now behind me — nothing but stark noth- 
ingness before me. I look off into the awful 
blackness of utter vacancy. Could I set up the 
Rossian tube on this outward-looking rampart, 



Il6 CKliKS'TlAI, EMPIRKS. 

not a single ray could it gather from the whole 
mighty night towards which it gases." 

Such are the distances of the fixed stars from 
us. How far are they from one another? By 
means of the actual distances of any two stars 
from us, and the apparent interval between them, 
we can easily compute "the real interval. This 
has never been found less than i,ooo millions of 
miles, about ten times our distance from the sun, 
which is the distance between the two stars of 
Zeta Herculis. And there is many another star 
whose nearest star-neighbor is almost infinitely 
farther away. 

Robin of the Longbow could send an arrow 
wonderfully far. Far-shooting Apollo, Homer 
being witness, could send one much farther. But 
even Apollo was under the necessity of taking a 
position within moderate distance of his target. 
But yonder celestial archers defy distance. It 
counts for just nothing to such long bows and 
strong bows as theirs. They shoot light at us and 
at one another across unimaginable universes. 
The silver shafts come flying to us from the other 
side of the creation (is there the other side?) with- 
out the least loss of speed, and hit their mark 
every time. This, however, we must confess 
they would not do if they did not shoot arrows by 
millions instead of by units. 



DISTANCES. 117 

Preposterous neighbors ! Individuals and na- 
tions are often cramped by their narrow quarters, 
and break away in impetuous rivers of emigration 
into roomy Americas and Australias, where they 
can get breath and elbow-room and have full 
scope for their faculties and industries and enter- 
prises. Surely the stars have no need to emi- 
grate. However crowded together they may 
seem by distance and by visual superposition, 
they have no occasion to say, " The place is 
too strait for me; give place to me that I may 
dwell." Who was it that said, u An ocean be- 
tween peoples is a great peacemaker"? If this 
is so, the stars are under heavy bonds to keep the 
peace. What stupendous Atlantics and Pacifies 
part them ! Space is awfully plentiful. Enough 
of it has been given to each star to satisfy the lar- 
gest appetite for loneliness and liberty. Do they 
need it that their vagaries and eccentricities may 
not disturb one another? How quiet and orderly 
they seem. One could think them hermit-saints, 
who have retired, each into his own nook of the 
vast azure wilderness, to escape temptation, to 
pray and fast and be alone with God. But per- 
haps they are not the stark hermits, and unsocial 
though bright-faced anchorites, that they seem. 
Is it not just possible that they have about them 
clans of retainers, families of children, which on 



Il8 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

account of their smallness or dimness cannot be 
seen by us? Oases in the widest desert we know 
of — bright islets frugally sown in a boundless sea! 
let us hope that you do not want for that most 
necessary thing, congenial companionship of your 
own species ! 

The questions are sometimes asked, How old 
is the earth? How long since the solar system 
was started? How far back that "beginning" 
of which our Scriptures speak in their opening 
sentence, i c In the beginning God created the 
heavens and the earth"? Men of science have 
tried to answer the first two questions in a rough, 
very rough way, with vast differences between 
themselves, and especially between geologists and 
astronomers; but the last question has seemed al- 
most too formidable to be grappled with, auda- 
cious as is modern speculation. Yet in view of 
what has been said of the exceeding distances of 
some of the stars, we can make a small contribu- 
tion towards an answer. Inasmuch as there are 
some stars so far away that their light has been 
hundreds of millions of years in coming to us, the 
first creation of vast masses of matter must have 
been at least hundreds of millions of years back. 
How much farther who can say ? 



VII. SIZES. 



1. APPARENT. 

2. AMONG THE NEAR. 

3. AMONG THE FAR. 

4. THE GIANT. 



SIZES. 121 



VII. SIZES. 



The ancients generally thought the apparent 
size of the moon, sun, planets, and stars fairly- 
represented their real size. So children and un- 
civilized men think now. To them the stars 
pass for luminous points, bright grains of sand ; 
and as for the sun and moon, they set them down 
at a venture as equal to an average human head. 
Occasionally an ancient scientist, like Anaxago- 
ras, thought that the sun and moon might be each 
as large as the Peloponnesus. Somewhat larger 
ideas were sometimes ventured upon, and we are 
told that Anaximander, w T ho lived some 600 years 
before Christ, thought that the moon was about 
nineteen times and the sun about twenty-seven 
times larger than the earth. But all such ideas 
were mere guesses and far astray from the current 
opinion even among the cultured. 

But just as soon as accurate instruments had 
made it possible to find accurately the places of 
the heavenly bodies, and it had been found that 
their displacement on the sky was very trifling 
for great changes in the position of the observer — 
that is to say, when it was found that their dis- 
tance from us was immense — then it began to be 



122 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

felt that their size must be immense also. Thus, 
as soon as it was known that the displacement of 
the moon from going a whole half-diameter of the 
earth at right angles to the moon's direction was 
about 57', and so it became known that its dis- 
tance from us must be about 237,000 miles, it was 
known that its real diameter must be about 2,100 
miles. In the same way we may find the diame- 
ters of all the other heavenly bodies which have 
apparent diameters in the telescope. They are 
as follows : 

Miles. Miles. 

Mercury . 2,900. Jupiter . . 85,000. 

Venus . . 7,500. Saturn . . 72,000. 

Earth . . 7,900. Uranus . . 33,000. 

Mars . . . 4,900. Neptune . 37,000. 

The asteroids and some of the planetary moons 
show no sensible disks in even the largest tele- 
scopes, so that w T e have to judge of their size 
from their relative brightness. According to this 
the diameters of the asteroids vary from 128 miles 
to less than 50, those of the satellites from 3,300 
miles in the case of one of the satellites of Jupi- 
ter, to less than 10 miles in the case of the two 
moons belonging to Mars. But the Sun is the 
wonder for size, for at the distance of 91,000,000 
of miles from us its apparent diameter means a 
real one of 852,000 miles. 



SIZES. 123 

But what are the sizes of the fixed stars? 
Here a difficulty arises. These objects have no 
measurable diameters in our telescopes, however 
powerful ; and so, even when their distances are 
known, their real diameters cannot be found in 
the way just mentioned. Here the instrument 
called the photometer comes into play. What 
would be the brightness of the sun at the distance 
of iVlpha Centauri ? This question is easily an- 
swered by means of the law that the light of a 
given object diminishes as the square of its dis- 
tance from the observer increases. And we find 
that the brightness of this star is twice what our 
sun would have at the same distance. In the 
same way we find that Sirius is equal to 63 suns, 
Polaris to 86, Capella to 430, Arcturus to 516, 
Alcyone to 12,000. But we remember that our 
sun is 852,000 miles in diameter. The unit with 
which we have compared the above stars is itself 
a gigantic thing. Think of a disk like Alcyone's 
that gives the light of 12,000 suns, and whose 
diameter, therefore, must be more than one hun- 
dred times that of our sun ! What a day that star 
would make for us if substituted for our sun ! We 
should need different eyes from our present ones, 
it is plain ; and, if the heat is proportioned to the 
light, we should need different bodies throughout, 
also a different world, for 12,000 times our great- 



124 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

est summer heat would melt down everything and 
convert it into gas. Twelve thousand equatorial 
days condensed into one would have a terrible sig- 
nificance to the most salamandrine nature known 
on this world of ours. 

So we see that the huge distances of the sky 
are marked by huge milestones. The great coun- 
try above is occupied by giant inhabitants, Ana- 
kim whose stature is so great that their shining 
shields can be seen across an almost limitless 
ocean. Ye who admire great stature, and would 
go, it may be, hundreds of miles to see a man 
twelve feet high, look up where you are and 
wonder at the mighty forms that nightly look 
down on us from the populous heavens. Certain- 
ly our little w r orld makes a very humble appear- 
ance in the presence of such stupendous colossi — 
much more do our petty kingdoms, principalities, 
and estates. How Russia and Great Britain and 
the United States, on occasion, can boast of their 
far-stretching parallels and meridians ! How even 
individual proprietors in these lands will flush 
themselves on the idea of possessing a few thou- 
sand acres of land, together with a few castles and 
manor houses and city blocks ! Behold the vast 
estates and palaces and cities and kingdoms of the 
Proprietor of proprietors! 



VIII. NATURES. 



1. ANCIENT GUESSES. 

2. MODERN CERTAINTIES. 

3. EARTHS AND SUNS. 

4. PLANETARY CENTRES. 

5. NEBUMS AS SUNS. 



Celestial Empires. 



NATURES. 127 



VIII. NATURES 

WE have seen what the ancients largely 
thought about the nature of the sun, moon, and 
planets, and how widely their views differed from 
the true. A like difference is found in regard to 
the fixed stars. "They are luminous exhala- 
tions from the earth, like the ignes fatui over 
marshes, ' ' said some. ' ( They are spangles of vari- 
ous sizes fastened to the inside of a hollow azure 
sphere," thought others. Others still, perhaps, 
were disposed to think that they were golden 
grains, heavenly eyes, the camp-fires of celestial 
hosts, or openings through the sphere into a glory 
beyond. The majority in rude ages and coun- 
tries, familiar with the heavens from infancy and 
pressed by their daily toils and needs, probably 
never fairly thought about the matter at all — 
never troubled themselves to form a theory of the 
nature of objects so aloof from their current lives, 
or imagined them to be the lesser among their 
innumerable divinities. Similar ideas and igno- 
rances are found to-day in some countries. 

And yet, all through the ages, wiser opinions 
have now and then found expression. Thales, 
who lived more than six centuries before Christ, 



128 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

held that the stars were of the same substance as 
the earth, but in a state of ignition. And this 
view was continued for some time in the Ionian 
School which Thales founded. 

But what has the latest science to say as to 
the nature of the fixed' stars? We have already 
seen that they are all objects at a vast remove 
from us, and consequently must be of vast size; 
and we have even made such precise determina- 
tions of some of these vast distances and sizes as 
strain our powers of expression and conception. 
As the spherical form is that to which all bodies 
are observed to tend under the influence of grav- 
itation, and as the sun and moon and planets are 
substantially spheres, we conclude that the fixed 
stars are spheres also. But what makes them 
shine ? Are they not, like our sun, vast worlds on 
fire ? As much is hinted to us by the thermo-mid- 
tiplier, which reports heat in all the brighter stars. 
But the spectroscope answers more largely. 

It tells us that Virgil built better than he knew 
when he built the stately verse: 

" Vos, asterni ignes, et non violabile vestrum 
Testor numen." 

It tells us that the stars are self-luminous; that 
their light is of an incandescent body; that it is 
in general the light of a comparatively solid and 
bright interior shining through an atmosphere of 



NATURES. 129 

glowing gas or vapor ; also, that these gases or 
vapors are, some of them, like those found on the 
earth, while others are unknow T n; that each orb 
has its peculiarity of constitution both as to the 
nature and proportion of its chemical elements. 
This difference of constitution, as well of stage of 
ignition, is suggested by a difference in general 
color. Some stars are white, some red, some blue, 
some green — in short, all the colors are represent- 
ed. But even those of the same general color to 
the eye give different spectra, and the same star 
sometimes gradually changes its color in the course 
of long periods. Thus Sirius has changed from 
red to green. 

So it is now found, what Kepler suspected and 
ventured to guess in writing, viz., that the stars 
are suns. If so, has not each one, like our sun, 
a system of planets revolving about it ? 

The time may come when direct observation 
can answer this question affirmatively. Already 
the minute companions of several double stars 
have come under suspicion as shining by re- 
flected light. But w r e want something more than 
suspicion; and, somehow, more has been obtained. 
Astronomers are a unit in the belief that each 
fixed star is the centre of a planetary group. And 
they are not troubled in this belief by the fact 
that it is not as yet decisively confirmed by direct 



130 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

observation. They say to themselves, "It is not 
strange that bodies relatively so small as all ob- 
served planets are, and shining by comparatively 
feeble reflected light, should as yet fail to report 
themselves clearly in our instruments across such 
immense spaces as separate us from the region of 
the fixed stars." 

But whence this universal positive belief 
among astronomers? There is absolutely noth- 
ing against it. All analogy is for it. As point 
after point of likeness to our sun (as to size, igni- 
tion, material, gravity, motion) has gradually 
come to our knowledge, we have of course been 
logically drawn to look with more and more favor 
on the idea that the likeness extends still farther 
and that the stars resemble the sun in the office it 
fulfils as the centre of light and heat and revolu- 
tion to neighboring planets. We find 61 Cygni 
trembling in its orbit as if disturbed by unseen 
neighbors. The readiest explanation of the vari- 
able stars is that, like our sun, they have spots 
which sympathize in some blind way with the 
movements of bodies in their vicinity. But per- 
haps the most fruitful source of the current belief 
is in that general course of astronomical experi- 
ence and observation the particulars of which are 
too minute and shadowy for individual presenta- 
tion, or even distinct conception, but which at last 



NATURES. 131 

sum up so heavily as to argue like a king. As 
we cannot individualize the particles of dew, 
though at last the fleece becomes wringing wet; 
as we cannot separate the stars in certain nebulae, 
though the accumulation of them brightly whi- 
tens the field of the telescope; so to one largely 
conversant with the heavens have come gradu- 
ally countless subtle suggestions which singly 
are hardly distinguishable, much less presentable 
in words, but which at last come to be enough to 
saturate the thought with the conviction that 
every star has its cortege of dependent orbs. In 
this way astronomers have come to be practically 
unanimous in allowing that the fixed stars repre- 
sent as many groups of worlds like that belong- 
ing to our sun. The friends of the nebular hy- 
pothesis are also forced to this by their view of 
the manner in which the stars were formed; while 
astronomers who believe in final causes and as- 
cribe the stars directly to the Supernatural are 
also forced to it by their view of what might be 
expected from the Supreme Being. What con- 
siderable use can the stars subserve save as suns 
to other worlds ? for surely they were not made 
in vain, or merely to make our nights somewhat 
more picturesque. Is it not justly inferable from 
the divine wisdom and goodness that yonder vast 
centres of light and heat and force have about 



133 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

them worlds to utilise their vast resources ? To 
suppose the contrary is to suppose that nature is 
comparatively a waste, and to subtract greatly 
from our conception of the empire of God — 
which is contrary to the whole drift of modern 
discovery. And so, what with this reason or 
with that, astronomers hold that the solar system 
is but a single example of arrangements that ex- 
ist through the whole realm of astronomy. 

This then is the nature of the fixed stars. They 
are vast worlds; they are vast worlds on fire, i. e., 
suns; they are vast suns composed of various ele- 
ments, some of which belong to the earth; they 
are vast suns, each of which is the centre of a 
planetary system. 

But what of those nebulae which have not yet 
been resolved into stars? These are variously 
estimated at from one-third to one-tenth of the 
whole number. While some astronomers suppose 
that these, like their fellows, are made up of dis- 
crete stars which would appear as such in more 
powerful instruments than we have at present, 
others suppose that they are vast, continuous 
masses of incandescent gas destined to finally ri- 
pen into planets and suns. The reasons assigned 
for this latter view are principally three: first, the 
known existence in space of extremely tenuous 
and diffused, material in the form of comets and 



NATURES. 133 

meteoric systems; second, the forms which some 
nebulae have and which are such as fire-mists 
would naturally take on their way to planets and 
satellites and suns— e. g., a spherical cloud with 
a central nucleus, a nucleus surrounded by a ring 
or rings, rings with nuclei of special brightness in 
them, a nebulous star; third, the gaseous spectra 
given by some of the nebulae. To this it is an- 
swered that comets are never incandescent save 
w T hen near the sun; that some of the nebulae hav- 
ing the special forms just referred to have been 
separated into stars; and that the gaseous spec- 
trum has been found given, not only by quite a 
large number of isolated stars in the Swan, Argo, 
and elsewhere, but also by some nebulae w T hich 
have been resolved by the telescope. 

Out of ten nebulae given by the Earl of Rosse 
as certainly or probably resolvable, six give gase- 
ous spectra. So that all the gaseous nebulae, so 
called, may be composed of separate stars, may 
even be composed of stars like our sun, thinks 
Prof. Stone, Her Majesty's astronomer at the 
Cape of Good Hope. For such stars, at certain 
distances from us, and with certain relations as to 
thickness, heat, and density between their gase- 
ous envelopes and their comparatively solid nu- 
clei, would not be likely to report the nuclei in 
their spectra. 



134 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Further, it is claimed that continuous fire- 
mists would not be visible at such a vast remove 
from us and at such low temperatures as the neb- 
ulae with gaseous spectra evidently are; that such 
mists could not have such permanent, irregular 
configurations, external and internal, and even 
vacant centres, as we sometimes notice; that such 
mists would never appear sharply defined and uni- 
formly bright throughout as do many of the neb- 
ulae in question ; also, that such mists, if real, are 
not such in number, size, specimen stages, and 
chemical constitution as one would have a right 
to expect in what express the origin and end of 
all the stellar systems. Special stress is laid on 
the fact that in general not more than three ele- 
ments, and sometimes less, are found in gaseous 
nebular spectra — viz., hydrogen, nitrogen, and 
one other element — whereas we ought to find as 
large a variety as compose the stars with their 
wealthy inventory. 

As says Huggins, the eminent English spec- 
troscopist, "The uniformity and extreme simpli- 
city of the spectra of all the nebulae oppose the 
opinion that this gaseous matter represents a neb- 
ulous fluid out of which the stars are elaborated. 
In such a primordial fluid all the elements enter- 
ing into the composition of stars should be found. 
If these existed in these nebulae the spectra of 



NATURES. 135 

their light would be as crowded with bright lines 
as the stellar spectra are with dark lines." 

These considerations will be found more fully 
stated in my work on ' ' Evolution. ' ! They seem 
to me of great weight. We can hardly do less 
than say that, especially in the present state of 
spectrum analysis which allows such wide differ- 
ences among experts and leaves largely uncertain 
the extent to which the spectrum of a given sub- 
stance may be varied by numerous conditions, 
there is nothing to prevent our regarding all the 
nebulae as so many Milky Ways, and saying with 
Sir John Herschel, u By far the greater part, prob- 
ably at least nine-tenths, of the nebulous contents 
of the heavens consists of nebulae of spherical or 
elliptical forms, presenting every variety of elon- 
gation and central condensation. Of these a 
great number have been resolved into distinct 
stars (by the reflector of the Earl of Rosse), and a 
vast multitude more have been found to present 
that mottled appearance which renders it almost 
a matter of certainty that an increase of optical 
power would show them to be similarly com- 
posed. A not unfair or unnatural deduction 
would therefore seem to be that those which re- 
sist such resolution do so only in consequence of 
the smallness and closeness of the stars of which 
they consist; that, in short, they are only opti- 



136 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

cally and not physically nebulous. Although 
nebulae do exist which even in this powerful tel- 
escope appear as nebulae, without any sign of 
resolution, it may very reasonably be doubted 
whether there be really any essential distinction 
between nebulae and clusters of stars. ' ' 



IX. MOTIONS. 



1. APPARENT. 

2. REAL. 

3. UNIVERSAL. 

4. CUMULATIVE. 

5. MIGHTY. 

6. PRETEREA NIHIL. 



MOTIONS. 139 



IX. MOTIONS. 

Certain apparent motions of celestial objects 
must have been noticed from the beginning. 
Such is the daily motion from east to west that 
is common to them all, and by which their posi- 
tions relative to one another are not disturbed in 
the least. A little closer observation next showed, 
and that at a time immemorially distant, that the 
sun, moon, and planets were constantly changing 
their places in respect to one another and the 
other celestial objects, and that each had its own 
law of change. And, until quite modern times, 
it was supposed that all these apparent motions 
were real, that all the heavenly bodies actually 
went around the earth once in 24 hours, and that, 
in addition to this common motion, a few were 
moving each on its own account. All the other 
heavenly bodies were supposed to have no motion 
at all among themselves, and so were called fixed 
stars. 

A part of these views we have found incor- 
rect; for example, the view that all the heavens 
go completely around the earth once a day. Had 
the ancients known how vast the heavens are, 
and at what vast distances from us many of its 



140 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

objects are placed, they would not have enter- 
tained such an idea for a moment. Think at 
what rate Capella, large as 430 suns like ours, 
would have to move in order, at a distance from 
us of more than 4,000,000 sun-distances to get 
around the earth in a day ! Only about 14,000,- 
000,000 miles a second ! Then think of all the 
stars, in their vast variety of distance from us, 
having their motions so adjusted to one another 
as to all make the circuit of the earth in exactly 
the same time ! So we have to conclude that 
these apparent motions are not real, but are due 
to a revolution of the earth on itself from west to 
east, thus making all the contents of the sky ap- 
pear to move from east to west. But this means 
a motion at our equator of 1,000 miles an hour. 

Also, the apparent circuit of the sun among 
the stars is found not to be real, but to be pro- 
duced by a revolution of the earth about the sun. 
Nothing but the supposition of such a revolution 
for the earth, and a similar one for each of the 
planets and comets, will reasonably explain the 
apparent motions of these various bodies. This 
will do it perfectly, if we only suppose the paths 
to be of a certain sort and moved in according to 
the law of gravity. But this, considering dis- 
tances from the sun means for us another motion 
of 68,000 miles an hour, and for the planet Mer- 



MOTIONS. 141 

cury one of 109,000, and for a certain comet at its 
fastest one of 1,200,000 — velocities of altogether a 
different order from any that we can impress on 
matter, and in comparison with which the move- 
ments of our steam-cars and cannon balls are al- 
most absurdly trifling. And whatever achieve- 
ments in travelling the future may have in store 
for us as the fruits of mingled genius and science, 
we may be sure that none of them can ever give 
us anything like those sublime speeds which from 
time immemorial have been going on so easily 
and quietly in the silent heavens. 

But it takes something more than the suppo- 
sition of its motion about the sun to explain the 
aspects and apparent motions of the moon. We 
have to suppose, in addition, that it makes a com- 
plete circuit both about the earth and about one 
of its own diameters in every 27 days. This ex- 
plains the observed fact that the same side of the 
moon is always presented to us. This also explains 
both phases and eclipses. In its course about the 
earth the moon sometimes passes through the 
earth's shadow and thus causes lunar eclipses; 
sometimes passes between us and the sun, and 
thus causes solar eclipses. But a monthly revo- 
lution about the earth at a distance from it of 
near 240,000 miles means an average motion of 

54,000 miles an hour. 

10 



142 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

But the sun itself, is that the quiet, motionless 
centre of all these motions? " This cannot be," 
says the law of gravity. "The attractions be- 
tween it and the bodies circulating about it re- 
quire it to move about the common centre of 
gravity of all." And observation has detected 
still another motion of the sun. The stars in one 
part of the sky appear to be gradually separa- 
ting from each other as by a common move- 
ment, while in the opposite quarter they are by a 
similar movement drawing together. This com- 
mon movement is accounted for by supposing 
that the sun, with all the bodies belonging to it, 
is moving towards the constellation Hercules and 
away from the constellation Virgo. The rate of 
change in the apparent relative position of the 
stars we are approaching shows the rate of our 
motion — about 14,000 miles an hour. 

But what of the fixed stars, so called ? Are 
they really fixed? Being, as we have seen, masses 
of matter, the law of gravity requires them all to 
be in motion, even as our sun is. As we have 
seen, they are worlds on fire, vast fervid furnaces 
by which the great palace of nature is warmed 
and lighted, and so have motion within them- 
selves of the most vehement and tumultuous sort. 
That each has also motion on an axis, as well as 
around the common centre of gravity of its plan- 



MOTIONS. 143 

etary cortege, is inferable from what we know of 
our own system and the principle of gravity, as 
is also a translatory motion by which it and all 
its dependent worlds are borne away towards still 
ulterior centres of attraction. Actual observation 
has proved this last motion of so many stars 
that we feel sure that it belongs to all. Multi- 
tudes of stars are found undergoing minute chan- 
ges of apparent place other than the common mo- 
tion just mentioned. Star goes about star. Groups 
of stars move among themselves as if physically 
related. Some 700 are found moving on curve 
lines ; while others, not visibly connected with 
any group or star, are seen stretching away to- 
wards unknown goals on apparently straight lines. 
By means of the displacement in the lines of their 
spectra, as already explained, Huggins has found 
that the following stars are approaching us or re- 
ceding from us at a rate which cannot be explained 
by our own motion alone: 

Approaching. 

Deneb 39 miles per second. 

Alpha Ursae Majoris .46 " " 

Pollux 49 " " 

Vega 50 " " 

Arcturus 55 " " 



144 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Receding. 

Rigel 15 miles per second. 

Regulus 15 " " 

Sirius 20 " " 

Betelgeuse 22 " " 

Castor 25 " c< 

Besides these motions in the line of vision 
there are others at right angles to that line of 
which our armored telescopes take note — multi- 
tudes of them. By taking account of their dis- 
tance and annual angular movement, we find that 
some of yonder gold-and-silver-hooped cavalry are 
charging across the universe with enormous speed. 
Thus the star known as 1830 Groombridge, which 
at the distance of forty years from us, as light goes, 
moves annually over seven seconds of arc, must 
be moving at not far from 720,000 miles an hour — 
this on the supposition that the motion is all per- 
pendicular to our axis of sight. Of course the 
actual motion is probably much greater than 
stated. Suppose we could stand off in space and 
see the huge, flaming system which this last star 
represents approaching us with its hundreds of 
worlds, and then sweeping sublimely and closely 
by at the rate of a million of miles an hour! We 
probably should get as near a just sense of al- 
mighty power as our faculties allow. 



MOTIONS. 145 

Everything on the earth is in movement. The 
atmosphere and waters, with their incessant and 
endless tides and currents, struggling ever to- 
wards an equilibrium which they never reach ; 
the solid surface disintegrated by various elemen- 
tal action and by the processes of vegetable and 
animal life, as well as shaken always and every- 
where from below by struggling fires and gases 
into earthquakes, elevations, subsidences — really 
what earthly thing is at rest? What with the 
chemical, mechanical, physiological, and volun- 
tary processes, there is not a single atom of the 
earth, however bound down and anchored it may 
seem, that is not moving among its fellow-atoms 
of the sphere. And then, as we have seen, the 
whole earth as one mass has at least four other 
great motions, viz., one on an axis, another as 
this axis describes a wavy line about the pole of 
the ecliptic, still another about the sun, and an- 
other still as it follows the sun across the universe 
towards Hercules. Each of these motions is ab- 
solutely continuous, without break for a single 
moment, and has been for — who shall say how 
long ? And yet most of these motions, especially 
the mightiest of them, are as silent as the grave. 
Not the sharpest ear has ever caught the least 
sound, not the most sensitive nerve has felt the 
least jar, as the great world has gone on spinning 



146 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

and wheeling and rushing through the spaces and 
millenniums. 

So it seems to be everywhere through the sky. 
We have fullest reason for saying that there is not 
an object in all yon populous and roomy heavens 
that is not subject to as great a variety of motions 
as besets all earthly things. Probably not a star, 
not an atom, is occupying at this moment a place 
it ever occupied before or will ever occupy again. 
And, as we have seen, the motion is often enor- 
mous. Many a Pegasus, instead of one, is cours- 
ing across the sky as if shod with light. Many 
an Argo, instead of one, is sailing across the blue 
deeps as if driven by all the winds that blow. 
And the movement of yonder pageant fleets and 
armies is as incessant as the flux of time. They 
are always campaigning. They never go into 
winter-quarters, nor even bivouac. Constant ac- 
tivity is to them the condition of safety. Is not 
the problem of the " perpetual motion" at last 
solved ? Or is nature merely a machine acted on 
by forces from without ? 

Some will have it that there is hardly any- 
thing else in the universe besides motion. i l Mat- 
ter,' ' say they, "has no other properties. Its heat, 
light, gravity, chemical affinities, sweetness or 
sourness, hardness, softness, color, weight, attrac- 
tions, repulsions, life, thought, feelings, forces of 



MOTIONS. 147 

all sorts, are merely varieties of one thing, viz, 
motion." This is rather too startling a simplifica^ 
tion of nature to get prompt acceptance from 
people who have a weakness for evidence, and 
would like to retain, if possible, some little foun- 
dation for religion. We object to the apotheosis 
of motion and the dethronement of God. We 
object to having, not only God, but even all na- 
ture itself, devoured by this modern divinity. 
This sort of Saturn will not give us a Golden Age. 
What assurance have we that the insatiable mon- 
ster, after having devoured all things else, inclu- 
ding his own children, will not at last proceed to 
devour himself and replace this magnificent uni- 
verse by a tremendous Zero ? 

No, we reject motion as a divinity and as a 
universe. But we accept it as a fact, and a very 
great fact, especially in the astronomical realms. 
The whole vault is alive with it. Where the 
naked eye, however searching its gaze, never 
could find anything but absolute fixedness, per- 
sistent watching and measuring with superb in- 
struments have found minute changes of place 
which, when uncoiled and interpreted in the light 
of the distance, show almost interminable stretches 
of space. We wonder to see the conjurer draw 
out of his sleeve or mouth endless lengths of rib- 
bon — endless somethings apparently from merest 



148 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

nothings; but our mathematics is a still more 
wonderful conjurer, for, out of the merest flux- 
ions of displacement which close telescopic ob- 
servation detects among the stars, it draws 
almost unspeakable lengths of distance and mo- 
tion. 



X. ORBITS. 



I. REALITY. 
SHAPE. 
INCLINATION 
DIRECTION. 
SIZE. 



ORBITS. 151 



X. ORBITS. 

It has incidentally been seen that the motion 
of some of the heavenly bodies is not on a straight 
line, but on a curve that practically returns into 
itself. The motions and aspects of the moon find 
their simplest explanation in the idea that it 
moves about the earth on what is nearly the cir- 
cumference of a circle. The apparent motions of 
the sun and planets and most comets, as well as 
of the August and November meteoric clouds, are 
most reasonably accounted for by the supposition 
that these bodies, together with the earth, move 
about the sun in orbits which differ much among 
themselves as to shape and position. 

The paths of the principal planets are nearly 
circular, and lie not far from the plane of the 
sun's rotation, and they are also traversed in the 
same direction in which the sun revolves. But 
among the asteroids and comets and meteor-clouds 
are found most striking exceptions in all these re- 
spects. The August meteors move in an orbit 
that touches our own, and yet goes out far beyond 
Neptune; and the orbit stands almost perpendic- 
ular to the solar equator. A very eccentric orbit 
also belongs to the November meteors, and their 



152 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

motion in it is retrograde. As much may be said 
of many comets. The satellites of Uranus also 
move from east to west in orbits nearly at right 
angles to the ecliptic. Such facts seem very sig- 
nificant. How can a rotation from west to east 
throw off a body from east to west ? How can a 
rotation in a certain plane leave behind a body 
moving at right angles to that plane? How can 
a £one with a circular motion gather into a body 
with a motion almost parabolic ? But, say some, 
"The eccentric comets are foreigners. They 
were generated outside of the solar system, and 
have been captured by the sun in its progress 
through space." It seems a sufficient answer to 
this that a comet must have always remained at- 
tached to the system from which it sprang, unless 
drawn off by the near approach of a stronger sys- 
tem, and that all the evidence we have on the 
matter is to the effect that the different celestial 
systems never approach within an almost im- 
measurable distance of one another. ' 

We also find that the motions of many of the 
* c fixed stars ' ' are orbital. Observation has shown 
this of some of the double stars, which under our 
own eyes have completed entire revolutions. But 
the orbit of a celestial body does not need to be 
completed before we can determine it to be an or- 
bit. Every regular curve has its law of curvature 



ORBITS. 153 

which is deducible from a very small specimen 
arc. This arc is expressed by what are called the 
elements of the orbit, which may be determined 
often by arfew observations. Of course, the greater 
the number of observations and the larger the arc 
dealt with, the greater will be the accuracy of the 
results. In the case of hundreds of double stars 
we have been able to see that their paths return 
into themselves; and in the case of some we have 
been able to determine the exact shape and si^e 
of the orbit. Others still are moving on what as 
yet seem straight lines; but this would be the 
seeming if the orbits were very large and the 
arcs as yet traversed under observation very 
small. And when we consider that the orbital 
path is universal among the celestial bodies near- 
est to us, and, indeed, among all whose paths have 
come sufficiently under our observation to allow 
us to judge conclusively the nature of their curve; 
and still more when we consider what the law of 
gravity requires for bodies moving obliquely to- 
wards one another in permanently friendly neigh- 
borhood, we easily satisfy ourselves that all the 
stars not only move, but move on curves that are 
orbits. But orbits cannot be parabolic or hyper- 
bolic; they must be circular or elliptical. As a 
matter of fact they are, in general, very elliptical, 
very like the paths of comets. In two cases, those 



154 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

of Alpha Centauri and Gamma Virginis, the orbit 
is nearly five times longer than it is broad; and 
generally the length exceeds the breadth by more 
than a quarter of itself. This fact is a very sig- 
nificant one in its bearing on the nebular hypoth- 
esis. 

Equally significant in the same direction is 
the fact that in some" multiple stars the planes 
of revolution are largely inclined to one another, 
while they are not known to be coincident, or 
nearly so, in a single instance. The general 
telescopic aspect of some groups and clusters tells 
the same story of them; for they are so densely 
crowded towards the centre, and are otherwise 
so characterized, as to force on us the idea of stars 
arranged in globular or other solid forms. The 
great cluster in Hercules, another in Libra, and 
still another known as 30 Doradus, are examples. 
Of course, in a globular cluster the orbits about a 
common centre must have to one another every 
degree of inclination. How can this be recon- 
ciled with the notion that the worlds in the same 
neighborhood have all sprung from one central 
rotation ? 

Let Sir John Herschel answer in words that 
cover a much broader question: "If the theory 
be regarded as receiving the smallest support from 
any observed numerical relations which actually 



ORBITS. 155 

hold good among the elements of the planetary- 
orbits, I beg leave to demur. Assuredly it re- 
ceives no support from the observation of the 
effect of sidereal aggregation as exemplified in the 
formation of globular and elliptic clusters. For 
we see this cause, working out in thousands of 
instances, to have resulted not in the formation 
ot a single large central body surrounded by a 
few smaller attendants disposed in one plane 
around it, but in systems of infinitely greater 
complexity, consisting of multitudes of nearly 
equal luminaries grouped together in solid globu- 
lar or elliptic forms." 

Among the celestial ellipses we know of none 
less than that which Neptune describes about the 
sun, that is one 18,000,000,000 of miles in sweep. 
The distance between two mutually revolving 
stars cannot be greater than the diameter of one 
orbit and may be only about one-half of it. As 
the distance between the two suns of Alpha Cen- 
tauri is about the distance of Neptune from our 
sun, one of the two component stars cannot have 
a less orbit than that planet. As the distance 
between the two suns of 61 Cygni is about three 
times the sun-distance of Neptune, one of the com- 
panions must have at least a sweep three times 
that of Neptune. As the distance between Mizar 
and Alcor in the tail of the Great Bear is about 



156 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

360 times the sun-distance of Neptune, one of 
those twin stars must have at least a path that 
would cover that of the planet 360 times. As 
the distance between our sun and Alcyone is 
about 300,000 Neptunian sun-distances, that great 
number expresses the number of times the great- 
est planetary orbit of our solar system would have 
to be applied to the other in order to measure out 
all its prodigious length. But then it is gen- 
erally thought that our sun is comparatively near 
the heart of that great neighborhood of suns 
that we call the Milky Way; and if this is so, 
what a trifle even this last orbit must be compared 
with that described by one of our frontier suns ! 
Why, that frontier sun, according to the sound- 
ings of Sir William Herschel, is 500 years of 
light-travel away from us, i. e., more than 6,000,- 
000 Neptunian sun-distances. And then the still 
grander sweep of Milky Way about Milky Way, 
of nebula about nebula ! Ah, what a cosmos is 
included in that last stupendous curve ! Were a 
sun to flash along it, leaving behind a permanent 
wake of glory, generations after generations of 
men would pass away before that glorious wake 
would come to differ sensibly from a straight 
line to human eye or instrument. When one 
comes to fairly think of it, the expanse included 
within the path of the humblest planet is some- 



ORBITS. 157 

thing fearful. But when one sees a sun putting 
its fiery girdle about an entire Milky Way with 
its 18,000,000 of sun-orbits, nay, about a great 
host of itinerant Milky Ways, and wheeling 
through the trackless and benighted spaces as if 
pursued by Omnipotence and yet doing it as ac- 
curately and safely as if guided by steel tramways, 
our hearts almost forget to beat. It is akin to the 
sublimity of God, 



Celestial Empires. 1 1 



XL PERIODS. 



1. OF ROTATION. 

2. OF REVOLUTION. 

3. AS RELATED. 

4. AS VARIOUS. 

5. AS VAST. 

6. AS CONSTANT. 



PERIODS, l6l 



XL PERIODS. 

The sun and all planets and satellites whose 
circumstances are such as to allow of rotations 
being observed if they actually exist, are found 
to have them — varying in length of period from 
about ten hours, in the cases of Jupiter and Saturn, 
to twenty-seven days, as in the case of our moon. 
That all the worlds of space rotate cannot be 
proved from any known law or force requiring 
rotation; and yet, I suppose, astronomers, almost 
to a man, would expect to find rotation in every 
celestial body, as well as a general spherical form, 
could it be subjected to a close examination. And 
they would also expect to find the time of rota- 
tion stable in every case, just as it appears to 
be everywhere in the solar system. The length 
of our day has not sensibly changed during the 
historic period. No other rotations have been 
found to change in the least. Each is not only 
uniform in its rate from moment to moment, but 
it is completed from age to age in exactly the 
same time. There is indeed a speculation that in 
the case of the earth there are disturbing causes 
at work tending to retard its rotation and to bring 
the times of rotation and revolution together. We 



l62 CEUSSMAI, EMPIRES. 

are told of the friction of the tides and trade- 
winds. We are told the planets rotate in a re- 
sisting medinm. We are told that if one side of 
a planet, from any canse, becomes loaded or 
weightier than another, the attractions on it from 
without would no longer be as if all its matter 
were condensed at its centre, and so a disturbance 
of the rotation must result. Still the great fact 
remains that no such disturbance has been de- 
tected by the most careful and skilled observation. 
Are we to infer that the change which has really 
taken place is so minute that it has not had time 
to accumulate into observation in 2,000 years, or 
that, though considerable, it is cancelled by a sys- 
tem of compensations such as is found largely in 
nature; or is the earth a well-balanced, symmetri- 
cally-weighted orb, revolving in a vacuum, and 
incapable of being cosmically disturbed by the 
agitations within itself? For aught that yet ap- 
pears the celestial rotation-periods are absolutely 
constant. 

As soon as we know the time in which the 
earth goes around the sun, and the mean distan- 
ces of the planets from the same body, we know 
their periods of revolution by means of the law 
which Kepler found tentatively and which New- 
ton proved from the law of gravitation, viz., 
The squares of the periodic times of any two planets 



PERIODS. 163 

are to each other as are the cubes of their mean dis- 
tances from the stm. Another law detected by the 
same great observer and mathematically deduced 
by the same great geometer, viz. , The radius-vector 
of a revolving body (that is, the straight line joining 
it to its primary) describes equal areas in equal times, 
also enables us to calculate the time of a complete 
revolution by observing how long it takes that 
line to traverse a given small area. Thus we 
have been able to get the periods of revolution of 
many bodies in all parts of the heavens: e. g. 



Mercury , 


. 88 days, 


Uranus . 84 years, 


Venus 


■ 225 " 


Neptune .165 " 


Mars . , 


2 years, 


Comet of 1858, 2, 100 


Jupiter , 


. 12 " 


" 1811, 3,000 


Saturn 


. 29 " 


11 1844, 100,000 



Comte undertook to show that the period of 
revolution of any planet is just the period of rota- 
tion which the sun must have had when filling 
its orbit. As to his success, the younger Her- 
schel, as illustrious in physical astronomy as in 
practical, after pointing out certain omissions 
and assumptions which really postulated the point 
to be proved, expresses himself thus: " Where, I 
would ask, is there a student to be found, who 
has graduated as a senior optime in this uni- 
versity, who will not at once lay his finger on 



164 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

the fallacy of such an argument and pronounce 
it a vicious circle ?" And M. Babinet, a distin- 
guished member of the French Academy of Sci- 
ences, proceeded to show by mathematics that 
were not " circular" that the rotation period of 
the supposed solar nebula at the distance of the 
earth must have been more than 3,000 years, and 
at the distance of Neptune nearly 3,000,000 years, 
" numbers," he says, "so infinitely superior to 
those which mark the times of revolution of the 
earth and Neptune that it is impossible to ad- 
mit that these bodies have been formed from the 
mass of the sun expanded to the planetary or- 
bits." 

It has already been noticed that the inner 
moon of Mars goes about that planet more than 
three times during one of its rotations. But at 
the time when the Martial nebula extended as 
far as the satellite its rotation would have been 
considerably slower still. This fact is probably 
the severest blow the nebular hypothesis has yet 
received from within the solar system. Says an 
American astronomer, "To reconcile its motion 
with any conceivable theory of the genesis (natu- 
ral) of the solar system, it is almost necessary to 
suppose that Phobos is not where it was made, or 
else that the planet has had its time of rotation 
changed." Of course such suppositions, without 



PERIODS. 165 

the least color of verisimilitude from any fact, are 
inadmissible in the courts of science. 

For periods outside of our system see the fol- 
lowing table: 

Zeta Herculis % 36 years. 

Zeta Cancri 60 

Alpha Centauri 75 

Omega I^eonis 82 

Gamma Coronae Borealis . . 100 

Delta Cygni 178 

Beta Cygni 500 

Gamma L,eonis .... 1,200 

Mi^ar 200,000 

Quadruple star near Vega 

One pair 4,000 

Another pair 12,000 

Pair about pair . . . 1,000,000 
Our sun about Alcyone . 20,000,000 
Frontier star " " . 100, 000, 000 

We see that the time of revolution is wonder- 
fully different for different bodies. One of the 
Martial moons goes about its primary in about 
seven hours. The comet of 1844 goes about the 
sun in 100,000 years. Among the fixed stars we 
find a like difference. The 700 composite stars 
in which an orbital motion has been observed 
have periods varying from 36 years in the case of 



166 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Zeta Herculis, to 1,200 years in the case of Gam- 
ma L,eonis, and 200,000 in the case of Mi^ar, and 
a million in the case of the quadruple star near 
Vega. See something even grander than this, 
vis., the 20 millions of years in which our sun 
circumnavigates Alcyone or some other centre. 
See something grander still: the 100 millions of 
years in which the outmost star of the Milky Way 
wheels about the whole great nebulae. And there 
is something still grander among the nebulae. 

These periods of revolution, like those of rota- 
tion, are grandly constant. The length of our 
year remains steadfastly the same. So does our 
lunar month, or period of the moon's revolution 
about the earth. So does each planetary year, or 
time of revolution about the sun. When we have 
once found the year of Neptune to be 165 of our 
years we can count on these figures as good for 
all time. Wherever we find the planet in its or- 
bit to-day, there our successors will find it at the 
end of each 165 years for thousands of years to 
come. So everywhere among the periods. Con- 
stancy reigns. Our astronomical lists just given 
will not need revision as the years roll on. What- 
ever slight changes occur have fixed periods of 
oscillation, and the average periodic time remains 
steadfastly the same. One thinks of Him who is 
" the same yesterday and to-day and for ever." ^ 



PERIODS. 167 

See how abysses of space are matched by 
abysses of time ! We have been lost in the end- 
less stretches of distance and orbital sweep: now 
we are lost in almost endless stretches of duration. 
How puny our lives on this planet seem in the 
presence of these little eternities that we are ever 
falling in with among the starry Methuselahs! 
They help our limping thought towards a con- 
ception of our own immortality and of the Eter- 
nal One. Evidently He who laid out his scheme 
of worlds on such a stupendous scale of time as 
well as of space has a plenty of time at his dispo- 
sal, is not hemmed in by the narrow chronologies 
of human history, can afford to count a thousand 
years as one day. He has the freedom of inex- 
haustible oceans of duration from which to draw. 
Our astronomy here shows us another ladder 
whose successive rounds of ever-widening periods 
gradually strain our ascending thought towards 
some faint and awe-inspiring conception of Him 
who inhabiteth eternity. 



XII. PERTURBATIONS. 



1. A SUPPOSITION. 

2. GENERAL PROBLEM. 

3. PARTIAL ANSWERS. 

4. PERIODIC VARIATIONS. 

5. CERTAIN USES. 



PERTURBATIONS. 171 



XII. PERTURBATIONS. 

The orbits which the heavenly bodies describe, 
when narrowly looked into, are found to be more 
or less disturbed by their mutual actions. The 
earth is not only attracted by the sun, but also by 
all the other members of the solar system. If the 
sun were the sole attracting body, our planet 
would describe an accurate and permanent ellipse 
about their common centre of gravity. As it is, 
with so many attracting neighbors, the path which 
we actually take through space is more or less 
disturbed, or made wavy in every direction. As- 
tronomers take account of these deflections from 
the orbit which the earth would traverse if not 
disturbed, by supposing the orbit itself to be acted 
on instead of the earth — to be elongated, tilted 
this way and that, made to revolve in its own 
plane — thus made to accompany the earth in all 
its movements. These supposed changes in the 
form and position of the orbit, made to accommo- 
date the shifting course of the planet, are called 
its perturbations. As each member of the solar 
system, great or small, with ever- varying distance 
and direction from us, has something to do with 
creating these perturbations, to estimate their 



173 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

amount so as to find the actual place of the earth 
at any moment is a difficult matter. Indeed, it 
cannot be done with absolute accuracy by any 
science yet known to us. 

But even this problem is not as difficult as 
that which actually presents itself. For actually 
the earth is subject not only to the attractions of 
the other members of the solar system, but to 
those of all the other bodies in space. None but 
the Creator could take exact account of all these. 
Happily, perfect exactness is not needed by us. 
The influence of the sun is so immensely pre- 
ponderant that it is only important to consider a 
few of the larger perturbations by other bodies, 
and to make only approximate estimates for them. 
And yet we must not forget that an infinite num- 
ber of other disturbances exist, which, for aught 
our science can show, may, in the course of the 
great future, bring about very great results. 

What is true of our earth is true of every other 
celestial body away to the outskirts of nature. 
Its path is bent hither and thither in every possi- 
ble direction by the innumerable attractions of 
all other bodies. And each of these other bodies 
is continually changing its direction and distance. 
Hence to determine with perfect precision any 
given celestial path is quite beyond all human 
faculty. The problem belongs only to an Infi- 



PERTURBATIONS. 1 73 

nite inind. Much more does it belong only to an 
Infinite mind to give the exact place at any one 
moment of all the revolving orbs that rush and 
shine through the immensities. What a tangled 
wilderness of attractions ! What a misty abyss of 
interactions ! Each perturbation has superimposed 
on itself an infinity of other perturbations, and 
each of these others carries a like infinite series, 
and so on indefinitely. The resultant of this 
complex of forces, could anything be more beyond 
the reach of human calculus ? But there is One 
who knows it perfectly. The intuitions of God 
put to shame the logic of differentials and inte- 
grals. The problem of the perturbations, in all 
its wondrous breadth, is simplicity itself to his 
gaze. He is the only real astronomer. When I 
think how long it was before even the most gifted 
men reached a passable solution of the problem of 
two revolving bodies, and of how few they are 
who can even comprehend an explanation of this 
most elementary solution, this first term of an in- 
finite series whose terms advance by a factor which 
is at once complex, variable, and infinite, and then 
think of the dimensions and bewildering intricacy 
of this stupendous thicket of universal attraction 
with its curves within curves, web interlaced with 
web, l ' in endless mazes lost, ' ' and yet seen through 

at a glance by that all-devouring Intelligence 
12 



174 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

which first devised great nature and ever since has 
kept open eye on the exact whereabout of every 
orb in all in its dense fog of labyrinthian interac- 
tions and wanderings, then it is that I profoundly 
realise the difference between man and God. 

Though the complete problem of the pertur- 
bations is so wonderfully beyond us, yet we have 
found out some very interesting things about them. 
One of these is that the perturbations of the solar 
system, considered apart from external bodies, 
are all of them periodic, alternately increasing 
and diminishing within certain fixed limits. This 
on the supposition that the mass of the central 
body is much greater than all the other bodies 
together; that the orbits are nearly circular, near- 
ly in the same plane and traversed in the same 
direction — a supposition that substantially agrees 
with fact, as they are only comets, asteroids, 
and satellites whose orbits and directions do 
not conform to this requirement. The masses of 
these bodies are so small that it is generally con- 
ceded that their non-conformity will not affect the 
periodical character of the perturbations. Nor 
probably would the existence of an extremely 
attenuated medium in the interplanetary spaces, 
such as has been supposed essential to light. 
But this medium is as yet mere conjecture. 

The perturbations in the solar system have 



PERTURBATIONS. 1 75 

periods of exceeding variety in many respects, 
especially as to length. Some make their round 
in a few years, while others consume many ages, 
and so are called secular. Thus the perturbation 
of the earth's axis known as the Nutation has a 
period of about 19 years, while that called the 
Precession of the Equinoxes has a period of 26,- 
000. In some cases we have still larger figures, 
mounting into the millions. 

By means of the perturbations the Calculus has 
come to great improvements. The endeavor to 
find out their causes and amounts has almost re- 
created our higher mathematics. The old prin- 
ciples and methods which Newton used so might- 
ily needed to be developed and reinforced by new 
discoveries before they could grapple successfully 
with anything more than the simpler forms of 
perturbation. So vast pains were taken to per- 
fect the instrument of investigation. Under the 
labors of such men as Clairaut, Laplace, and La- 
grange it became able to explain and estimate 
with sufficient precision all the important dis- 
turbances of the solar system — in fact, has become 
the most wonderful instrument of scientific dis- 
covery the world has ever known. The brawn 
of the giant was largely gained by wrestling with 
the perturbations. It is the old story — struggle 
and strength. As struggling with winds and 



176 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

winters has made the great oak what it is, as 
struggling with the difficult builds up both body 
and mind of the youth into a forceful and execu- 
tive manhood, so struggling with these stubborn 
perturbations has gradually built up the infant 
Calculus of Newton and Leibnitz into a glorious 
maturity. 

Also by means of the perturbations we have 
been able to discover one planet, Neptune, and 
not improbably will be able to discover others — 
say, if you please, Intra-Mercurial or Extra-Nep- 
tunian. When we find a disturbance in the orbit 
of a body which its known neighbors will not ac- 
count for we are entitled to say, as was said in the 
case of Uranus, ' l There is some other body in the 
neighborhood whose mass and orbit are such as to 
cause the trouble. ' ' 

Also, as the amount of trouble at any given 
point depends solely on the mass, distance, and 
direction of the troubling neighbor, if the last 
two elements are known we are able to find the 
mass concerned in a given perturbation. In this 
way the masses of the planets that have no satel- 
lites, and also of the satellites themselves, have 
been determined. In the case of such planets as 
have satellites their masses can be inferred from 
the curvature of the orbits of the satellites at any 
point; for if we know the tangential velocity of a 



PERTURBATIONS. 



177 



satellite at any point the amount of deflection 
from a tangent in a given time measures the at- 
tractive force of the primary, and so its quantity 
of matter. This deflection from a tangent is itself 
really a perturbation — a disturbance of the recti- 
linear motion which but for it would be perma- 
nent. When the masses of the sun and planets 
are known we readily find their mean densities, 
their sizes being given. In the following list 
these elements are given for the leading members 
of the solar system, the mass and density of the 
earth being taken as units: 



Mass. 



Mercury . 
Venus 
Earth . 
Mars . . 
Jupiter , 
Saturn 
Uranus 
Neptune 
Sun . . 



>6 5 . 



.785. 



1. 000. 



. .124. 
300.857. 
90.032. 
12.641. 
16.761. 
354,000.000. 



Density. 
1.24. 



.92. 
I. OO. 



.92. 



.22. 

.12. 
.18. 
.17. 
.25. 



We should expect that, were the planets gen- 
erated naturally from a nebulous mass, the sun 
would be the densest body in the system, and the 
planets would decrease regularly in density to 
the outskirts. But actually the sun is among 



178 CKI.KSTIAI, EMPIRES. 

the least dense bodies; Mars is equal to Venus, 
which is inferior to the earth; while Saturn is 
inferior to Uranus. 

Of course the same method is theoretically 
applicable for determining the masses and densi- 
ties of many stars. If the orbit which one star 
describes about another can be so known that 
its exact law of curvature at any given point 
can be found, we are able to find at that point 
the proportion between the centrifugal and cen- 
tripetal forces on which alone the curvature de- 
pends. But the centrifugal force is virtually 
given in the direction and velocity at that point; 
and the latter element is given by the known 
period and orbital place in connection with Kep- 
ler's law that a radius- vector must describe equal 
areas in equal times. But as we can know what 
effect our sun would produce at the same distance, 
we have the means of comparing the masses of 
the central star and our sun. The only difficulty 
is in determining with sufficient precision the ele- 
ments of such remote orbits. 



XIII. SYSTEMS. 



1. APPARENT DISORDER. 

2. SUPPOSED ORGANIZATIONS. 

3. THE REAL. 

4. NOTABLE FEATURES. 



SYSTEMS. l8l 



XIII. SYSTEMS. 

No star is a hermit. Though individualized 
in the heavens as islands are in the ocean, though 
separated from one another by what seem end- 
less spaces, all the heavenly bodies are in a state 
of organized society. They compose great and 
orderly communities. They hang together, by 
no means loosely; they act on one another con- 
stantly and powerfully; they interchange various 
good offices; they move harmoniously with refer- 
ence to one another; they obey common laws and 
have common pivots of revolution; no force ever 
succeeds in breaking the mighty though invisi- 
ble bonds that unite them. Call them families, 
clans, tribes, armies, nations — nations, as we 
shall see, with no civil wars or real dissensions 
among them, no changes of constitution or gov- 
ernment or dynasty or even by-laws. 

And yet the heavenly bodies have not an ar- 
tificial arrangement that at once strikes the eye 
and suggests a manufactured article, as Sir John 
Herschel said the elements of matter did to him. 
On the contrary, at a first view the stars seem 
sown at haphazard through the void; it is a king- 
dom of pell-mell and disorder that we see, a vast 



1 82 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

mob of everlasting fireflies pinned to the vault. 
But this view has never been satisfactory to 
thoughtful people. The scientific instinct has 
felt that, beneath the surface, there must be a 
principle of orderly arrangement, and has from 
time immemorial been conjecturing what that 
principle may be. Are not the heavens built about 
the earth in a series of concentric crystal spheres, 
each having its own peculiar law of motion, but 
all moved by the outermost sphere of all, a 
pritnum mobile? This original supposition be- 
came complicated by other suppositions as new 
facts gradually came into view and demanded 
explanation, until the full Ptolemaic system, with 
its outfits of cycles, deferents, epicycles, held 
unchallenged possession of the scholarly world, 
and continued to hold, century after century. 
But such a system did not satisfy Tycho Brah6. 
Instead of granting that the whole heavens move 
about the earth directly, he maintained that the 
planets move primarily about the sun and then 
with the sun about the earth. This idea was 
better, but not best. A little later Copernicus 
revived the theory of Pythagoras, for long ages 
completely dead and buried, that the sun is the 
centre of revolution, not only of the planets, but of 
the earth itself. At last we have the beginning 
of the true system of the heavens. The Coperni- 



SYSTEMS. 183 

can system is demonstrably true; its predecessors 
are demonstrably false. This is rational; the oth- 
ers, to our present knowledge, are ridiculous. 

But as yet we have only a glimpse at the true 
system of the heavens. We see only a planet 
with a moon or moons revolving about it, and 
then a number of planets with their moons re- 
volving about the sun. But how about the in- 
numerable remainder of celestial worlds? We 
have elsewhere shown that these are gathered 
into still higher and grander systems of revolu- 
tion. In addition to satellite and planetary sys- 
tems we can make out sun systems, group sys- 
tems, cluster systems, nebula systems, ulterior 
systems, an ultimate or universe system. 

Consider the heavens as one vast neighbor- 
hood. According to the law of gravity, all this 
grand total of stars must revolve about their 
common centre of gravity. This is the ultimate 
system. But this ultimate neighborhood is dis- 
tributed into great sub-neighborhoods, each of 
two or more nebulae (see examples about the poles 
of the Milky Way), each neighborhood widely 
separated from its fellows, and therefore revolving 
about its own centre of gravity. This is an ulterior 
system. Of nebulae, each is widely apart from its 
fellows — a veritable island in space — and there- 
fore must revolve about its own centre of gravity. 



184 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

This is a nebula system. Each nebula consists of 
two or more clusters of stars, each cluster widely 
apart from its fellow-clusters, and therefore revol- 
ving about its own centre of gravity. This is a 
cluster system. Bach cluster consists of two or 
more groups of stars,, each group widely apart 
from its fellows, and therefore revolving about its 
own centre of gravity. This is a group system. 
Each group consists of two or more sets of suns, 
each set widely apart from its fellows, and there- 
fore revolving about its own centre of gravity. 
This is a sun system. Each of the suns in a sun 
system has about it several planets, each sun 
family widely apart from its fellows, and there- 
fore revolving about its own centre of gravity. 
This is a planet system. A planet generally has 
near it one or more satellites. This little family 
also is widely apart from similar ones, and there- 
fore must revolve about its own centre of gravity. 
This is a satellite system, the elementary unit of 
celestial organisation. 

As we ascend from this simplest class of sys- 
tems, the interval between systems of the same 
class continually widens, just as does the interval 
between varieties, between species, between gen- 
era, between orders or families, between classes 
in living organisms. What an organic interval 
between the vertebrate and radiate animals as 



SYSTEMS. 185 

compared with that between different varieties of 
pigeons or of men ! What a space-interval be- 
tween nebulae as compared with that between 
satellite systems ! It seems as if the Builder was 
far more concerned to prevent the possibility of 
the mutual interference of the greater systems 
than of the smaller, as he might well be. 

Such are some of the celestial systems. 
Doubtless they are very far from being all. Be- 
tween the satellite system and the universe sys- 
tem there may be an almost infinite number of 
distinct neighborhoods and centres of revolution; 
and our moon may be coursing at one and the 
same time not only about the earth and about the 
sun and about Alcyone, but about millions of 
other centres, while wheeling out that greatest 
curve of all which is to go about the heart of all 
creation. Will it ever be able to complete such 
an ellipse as that? Will it last long enough to 
finish such a journey? And is it purely by forces 
inherent in mere earthy matter that it goes stead- 
ily on from age to age, working out, without fal- 
tering and without confusion, its vast complex of 
orbits? As each system embraces satellite sys- 
tems, each has an indefinite number of orbits, 
gradually ascending in grandeur and in the dig- 
nity of their centres, until at last we come to 
those that sweep around the common centre of 



l86 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

gravity of the whole universe. Wheel within 
wheel, orbit taking hold on orbit in unimaginable 
spirals — what a tangled Black Forest of motions 
which no human genius, though yoked to super- 
human industry, can ever find a way through ! 

All celestial systems are stupendous in their 
outspread with reference to any unit of magnitude 
used on the earth. But some among them quite 
confound us, and almost take our breath away by 
their stupendousness. Those cluster systems in 
Libra and Hercules, each of them has thousands 
of suns packed together into an intense and un- 
speakable glory within a space about one-tenth of 
that occupied by the moon, and yet without ap- 
preciable parallax. If the 30,000 suns, or more, 
which compose the Herculean system are only as 
far apart from one another as we are from the 
nearest fixed star, the diameter of the system must 
be formidable — almost to an angel's wing. 

But look at a nebula system, the one best 
known to us, viz., the Milky Way. According 
to the soundings of Sir William Herschel, this 
system spreads its 18,000,000 of suns, with their 
planets and satellites, over a space whose diame- 
ter is not far from 180,000,000 diameters of the 
earth's orbit, or 1,000 years of light-travel. 

If we look away from our Milky Way to other 
Milky Ways, we find them sometimes apparently 



SYSTEMS. 1S7 

related to each other, as are the double and mul- 
tiple stars. Nay, we find large groups and even 
clusters of nebulae of about the same brightness 
and general aspect, coming into view with about 
the same optical powers, evidently belonging to 
the same order of distances from us. In the 
Magellanic Clouds we have a cluster of 300 fir- 
maments. In the wing of Virgo we have one of 
1,000 firmaments. Just think of the space occu- 
pied and swept over by that last ulterior system ! 
Suppose its members to average as large as the 
firmament to which we belong, though Sir Wil- 
liam Herschel thought ours to be one of the small- 
er firmaments. This, as has been said, it takes 
light 1,000 years to cross. But we have good 
reason to believe that the interval between any 
two nebulae is vastly greater than the breadth of 
one of them. What is the breadth of a satellite 
system compared with the average interval be- 
tween satellite systems? — of planet systems or 
sun systems or group systems compared with the 
average intervals between those systems respec- 
tively? And, as we have seen, the disparity 
grows rapidly as we ascend in the scale of sys- 
tems. Accordingly the intervals that separate 
the various members of that great firmament sys- 
tem in Virgo must be vastly greater than any we 
have yet considered, and the spaces occupied and 



1 88 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

traversed by that chiliad of travelling firmaments 
must be almost infinitely greater still. Millions 
of years of light-travel would be required for 
crossing it. The old Hermes would never have 
undertaken such a task. The most audacious 
imagination refuses to do it, unless it be erased 
as well as audacious. 

But what is even such a system compared 
with that final congeries of systems which in- 
cludes all the orbs of space as they go wheeling 
sublimely about that innermost pivot of revolu- 
tion which it is so easy to believe is the central 
throne of Deity as well as of gravity ! No words 
of man can properly express such an accumula- 
tion of magnitudes. Our intelligence does not 
begin to master it Even our imaginations lie 
dazed and helpless before such lengths and 
breadths. Space is absolutely infinite; and our 
telescopes, as they rise in space - penetrating 
power, are ever bringing into view new firma- 
ments, and give us no hints whatever of nearing 
the frontiers of the stellar universe. Science 
from her last watch-tower lifts both hands in 
astonishment and despair. Then fancy, fresh 
and strong of wing, takes up the fallen measu- 
ring line and goes outward faster than the beams 
of light, and still outward, and outward still for 
ever so long among the unending suns, until she 



SYSTEMS. 189 

too at last grows faint of wing, and with pale 
and gasping lips invokes the angels. u O Mi- 
chael, the prince, take thou this measuring-rod 
which I can hold no longer, and carry it to the 
last world that sweeps about the throne of the 
Eternal." And the angel shook his glorious 
w T ings and folded them again. " You ask of me 
the impossible. Strong as are my pinions, they 
are not equal to such a task as this. From this 
point outward I have often gone for never, never 
so long among the firmaments, and never yet 
have I reached the place where there did not seem 
as much of a glory of worlds before me as behind 
me. The last world — the last world ! no, I can- 
not undertake to find that. You must go to Him 
who created it. All we angels have to say after 
we have taken our widest flights is, Lo, these are 
parts of His ways ! How small a portion is known 
of Him ; but the thunder of His power who can 
understand ?" 



Celestial Empires. 



J 3 



XIV. STABILITIES. 



1. UNSTABLE SYSTEMS. 

2. LAGRANGE'S THEOREM. 

3. STELLAR EQUILIBRIUM. 

4. LOCAL CATASTROPHES. 



STABILITIES. 193 



XIV. STABILITIES. 

Stars are no tramps, disorderly vagrants whose 
whereabouts for any length of time cannot be 
counted on. They are bound up together in sys- 
tems over which law reigns. 

But, then, systems under law are not always 
stable. They often decay in a short time. They 
not seldom come into mutual conflict, and shatter 
one another to pieces. Corporeal systems, social 
systems, political systems, systems of philosophy 
and religion — they have been known to meet one 
another like opposing battering-rams in full ca- 
reer; and, lo, the field is covered with ruins! 

How is it with these shining systems above 
in their bewildering numbers and impetuous 
courses? Do they after a while fall to pieces of 
themselves ? Are they mutually destructive ? Do 
they impinge, collide, switch one another off into 
aimeless vagrancy and final wreck ? 

L,agrange has shown that if all the members 
of a planet system, both planets and satellites, 
revolve in a vacuum about a central body far 
greater in mass than all of them, in orbits nearly 
circular, nearly in the same plane, and traversed 
in the same direction, the system will be stable 



194 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

for ever, unless some force from without interferes 
to destroy it. But these conditions of stability 
do not all exist. There is reason to suspect that 
we are not moving in a void. And we know of 
several minor bodies of the system whose orbits 
are very eccentric, very much out of the general 
plane of the system, and traversed from east to 
west. To be sure the inter-planetary ether, if it 
exists, must be extremely attenuated: also the 
non-conformist comets, asteroids, and satellites 
are of small masses relatively; but who can as- 
sure us that these small elements of confusion, 
contradiction, and disorder may not after a long 
time so accumulate their effects as to subvert the 
system ? No one has yet done this. It is certain, 
however, that our system is in a condition of sta- 
ble equilibrium so far as main points of structure 
are concerned; and it may yet be proved that 
these main things are able to dominate and neu- 
trali^e all the elements of instability — -just as it 
has been proved that small deviations from the 
circular form or a common plane in orbits can 
be dominated, and just as the conservative forces 
ia. some great empire may be so immensely pre- 
ponderant over the destructive as to put it quite 
out of danger from the petty misdemeanors of scat- 
tered individuals. As a matter of fact, the bodies 
of our system have been observed rolling har- 



STABILITIES. I95 

moniously together for an immensely long period ; 
we know of no instance of collision or precipita- 
tion into the sun by means of the mazy actions 
and counteractions of the rushing orbs with their 
ever-changing configuration and everlasting itin- 
eracy. 

The same may be said of any other celestial 
system. During all the long time in which the 
sky has been observed, has any star been known 
to strike against any other star ? Stars have been 
occulted often — that is, other bodies have passed 
tween us and them so as to hide them from view; 
but after a while they have appeared again quite 
unharmed. Stars have sometimes disappeared 
without sensible occultation, or have suddenly 
flamed up into unusual splendor; but never as the 
result of known collision with other bodies, and 
generally under circumstances inconsistent with 
it. 

When we consider the vast number of moving 
worlds that lie under the gaze of our telescopes, 
the headlong speed and endless variety of direc- 
tion with which they are moving, and the un- 
speakable complications involved in such a mael- 
strom of interdependent orbits, such chronic, not 
to say everlasting, freedom from mutual conflict 
and disaster is something wonderful. Individual 
men often interfere with one another; ships on 



196 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

the high seas come together and sink; families 
shock against families, parties against parties, 
nations against nations, on the fields of business, 
diplomacy, and battle; even religious denomina- 
tions do not always manage to get along without 
mutual interference; I had almost said that in- 
terferences and conflicts with one another are 
not wholly unknown among the very scientists 
themselves, both satellites and primaries. And 
yet above us we see a shining empire where from 
time immemorial reigns unalterable concord — in- 
dividuals, families, parties, nations, all packed with 
mighty forces and rushing with stormy energy in 
every conceivable direction, and yet, so far as we 
can see, always religiously respecting the safety 
and rights of one another. It looks very much 
like intelligent prearrangement. It looks very 
much like a current Providence. It is quite in 
harmony with the idea that at the heart of our 
astronomy there is a King who knows how to 
govern into order and safety even a boundless 
empire. 

Yes, the heavens are stable: " For that He is 
strong in power not one faileth." Still we would 
not like to say that the present celestial arrange- 
ments are unending. They have looked down in 
undecaying beauty and splendor on all past hu- 
man generations, and, for aught we know, may 



STABILITIES. 197 

look down in unbroken quiet on as many more. 
But at last a catastrophe will come — at least to 
the earth and its atmosphere. The heavens 
being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements 
melt with fervent heat, and the earth and all 
things therein shall be burned up. That will 
befall our earth which seems to have occasionally 
befallen other celestial bodies. A new star sud- 
denly flames out to view till it is visible at noon- 
day, gradually decreases in brightness, and at 
last disappears permanently. Is not this the exit 
of a consumed world ? However this may be, our 
fate is sure. But this does not necessarily mean 
a celestial collision. There are other means of 
setting a world on fire. Besides, the ' l sure word 
of prophecy n tells us that the event will be wholly 
unexpected by the men then living; which could 
not be if the disaster should result from the grad- 
ual approach of another world to ours. Men 
would see the approaching body ever increasing 
in si^e and splendor, till at last it would fill the 
whole sky. The warning of the coming disaster 
would be ample to all mankind; it would not 
come "as a snare" on men, " as the lightning," 
and find men " eating and drinking, marrying 
and giving in marriage." 



XV. FORCES. 



1. TERRESTRIAL. 

2. CELESTIAL. 

3. TOTAL. 



FORCES. 20I 



XV. FORCES. 

LET us listen ! What is that we hear, like 
the far-off march of armies or the voices of dis- 
tant seas or the rustle of infinite wings in the 
depths of heaven? The air is full of delicate 
noise — the seeds and ghosts of sound rather than 
sound itself — on the broad bosom of which come 
out occasionally in relief the notes of birds, the 
lowing of cattle, the sighing of winds, the mur- 
mur of brooks, the voices of men. What is it? 
It is the omnipresent voice of change. 

Something is happening. Many things are 
happening. In fact, no end of things are hap- 
pening with every indivisible moment. The 
earth and every particular thing it contains is in 
a state of constant flux. Each new instant a 
new deluge of change sweeps all round the globe. 
Not a nook is left unfilled, not a peak is left un- 
covered. There is at least one universal deluge. 
No one thing maintains for any appreciable time 
absolutely the same place, form, sise, color, con- 
stitution, or appearance. Not one thing is to-day 
as it was yesterday, or even as it was a moment 
ago. It changes while we are looking at it, 
however briefly; nay, the looking eye itself has 



202 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

changed since the look began. Yonder animal, 
yonder tree, yonder stone, yonder anything, is 
ever in process of becoming something else. 
Wherever we look novelties are coming and go- 
ing in infinite swarms. The most stable things 
we know of (to say nothing of the restless ocean 
and the still more restless atmosphere, and, if you 
please, the still more restless ether) are going and 
coming, increasing or diminishing, maturing or 
decaying, becoming brighter or darker, forsaking 
this shape for that, shading from one hue to an- 
other, passing out of this relation to its neighbors 
into a different. Everything is swept along by 
ten thousand different currents — swept down upon 
from the skies, swept up to from the depths, swept 
in upon from every point of the horizon. The 
past, the present, the future, all break against it 
in ceaseless waves. Change charges on us in 
armies upon armies. Every leaf trembles and 
throbs with transition. Every day is hasting to- 
wards night, and every night towards day. Every 
day is effervescing into to-morrow. What w T ith 
spring, summer, autumn, winter, the face of the 
earth is a calculus of variations. "Up and 
away !" seems the motto for everything. Every 
molecule is circulating. Every atom is ever seek- 
ing equilibrium and never finding it. Ocean, 
atmosphere, and ether are hardly more restless 



FORCES. 203 

than the solid land which is vibrating ceaselessly 
down to the very centre with the tramp and play 
and rage of teeming populations and nomadic 
elements. And spirit, with which in its different 
grades the earth is so immensely peopled, is even 
more mercurial than matter, more sensitive to 
influence than the very clouds and gases and 
ethers, more easily driven through all the moods 
and tenses of thought and feeling and volition 
than the vapors are into all shapes and places by 
strong winds. Now and then transition is abrupt 
and sonorous; but generally things glide quietly 
from one state to another in grave respect for the 
doctrine of continuity: the old is father to the 
new, and the new carries all the future in its 
womb. 

And, doubtless, our changeful world is but a 
sample of all others. We have seen how full the 
astronomical heavens are of motions — how mo- 
tion is crowded on motion, that is, change on 
change, in cycles and epicycles without end. 
Surely it is yonder as it is here. Change, unceas- 
ing change, universal change, change on a most 
wonderful and confounding scale, is the very 
condition of stability in all the regions accessible 
to our telescopes. As here, so everywhere and 
always through the blue immensities, are flying 
the shuttles of an infinite weaving and unweav- 



204 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ing; new patterns are waxing and old ones are 
waning, and Penelope unmakes her web as fast 
as she makes it. 

Now these changes, great and small, sensible 
and insensible, gradual and abrupt, that flood all 
nature are due to certain causes which we call 
forces. What the ultimate nature of these forces 
is it may not be easy to say; but it is easy to 
arrange them into classes according to the na- 
ture of the changes they cause. So we speak of 
mechanical forces, of chemical forces, of vital 
forces, of spiritual forces, and refer to each 
class its proper class of changes. Thus the 
changes of day and night we ascribe to the 
mechanical force, whatever it may be, that 
causes the rotation of the earth on its axis; the 
changes of the seasons to gravity and projectile 
force, carrying the earth about the sun with axis 
inclined to its plane of revolution; the changes 
expressed in the perturbations called the tides, 
the precession of the equinoxes, the nutation of 
the earth's axis, to gravity as exerted by the sun 
and moon. Thus the changes in the intimate 
composition and structure of bodies, as various 
elements unite or separate, are ascribed to an 
attractive force called chemical residing in each 
element and which differs from gravity in that 
it acts only at insensible distances and differs in 



FORCES. 205 

degree towards different substances. Also, the 
changes that take place in living organisms, 
whether vegetable or animal, connected with cir- 
culation, nutrition, growth, reproduction, are re- 
ferred ultimately to another class of forces called 
vital which somehow underlie and use the chem- 
ical and mechanical forces and are sufficiently 
different from them to deserve another name. 

These different classes of forces are often sup- 
posed to be only different forms of one thing, and 
this one thing is supposed to be motion. Some 
say that this motion is the ultimate force, that it 
resides only in matter, that it is indestructible, 
eternal, and invariable in amount. Others, by 
the same general way of thinking, deny this, and 
say that all the modes of motion are purely the 
product of a personal divine force which is the 
real cause of every occurrence. Still others stout- 
ly deny that all forces are resolvable into motion; 
and support themselves by such strong arguments 
as Prof. Birks, of Cambridge, England, has pre- 
sented in his " Modern Physical Fatalism. " 

But all theory apart — w r hatever may be 
thought of the nature of force and of its origin, 
there can be no doubt that the whole amount of 
it involved in producing the ceaseless and univer- 
sal deluge of change, and of stress towards change, 
that momently sweeps round this world and all 
14 



206 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

worlds must be inconceivably great. Great re- 
sults must have correspondingly great causes. 
Results infinitely extended in space and time 
bespeak an infinite sum of force. 

But perhaps the. justest impression of the 
astronomical dynamics is gained, not by consid- 
ering how much the individual jets of force 
everywhere must sum up to, without regard to 
the magnitude of any one, but by looking at 
some of the larger exhibitions of that force here 
and elsewhere. 

Look at our planet. What an idea of power 
is given in the rushing of winds, the tossing of 
oceans, the uplift of earthquakes, the thunder, 
lightning, and amazing velocity of electric dis- 
charges ! Look through the geologic domain and 
see how the rocks have been melted, the strata 
broken and twisted and tilted and lifted as so 
many straws, lofty mountains and huge conti- 
nents heaved up from the ocean bottom ! What 
stormy heats and mighty vapors and gases wres- 
tle and rave and heave away in the fiery heart of 
the earth and voice themselves in its volcanoes ! 
What conflagrations, detonations, deluges, gigan- 
tic monsters terrible to behold, have left tokens of 
themselves ! At any given moment what power 
is expressed in the aggregate of chemical actions, 
of vegetable processes, of animal processes and 



FORCES. 207 

actions through all the populous seas and airs and 
lands ! Looking only at the will-force (the force 
that obeys the summons of the will) put forth by 
all the animal tribes, and especially by man, and 
still more especially by the most forceful and ex- 
ecutive of men, we find ourselves before a most 
impressive fact. The earth is alive with forces; 
not an atom but is energetically acting on all 
its fellow-atoms in many different ways; a vast 
hive of sleepless, bewildering dynamics, efferves- 
cing, swirling, " toiling and moiling" in every 
possible direction and with apparently endless 
mutual antagonisms, and yet somehow giving as 
their last result a scene of order and beauty and 
majesty. In short, the planet quivers and boils 
and surges with force at every point. The great 
furnace and crucible are never at rest. Who can 
sum up this mass of energy and state the con- 
founding total ? 

Next look at the solar system. Here we have 
some hundreds of worlds, each of which resembles 
the earth in being a compact nest of domestic 
forces, and whose central orb indeed seems in 
many respects the theatre of a still more stormy 
and terrible energy. With what momentum the 
planets spin on their axes, with what independent 
momentum they swing about the sun, we have 
already seen. To these momenta add that with 



208 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

which the whole system whirls about yonder stel- 
lar centre, and so proceed to one knows not how 
many other momenta, till we reach the last great 
circuit of all. Do the same for every other planet 
system. Then sum up all these steady and swift 
careers and ask what measures of force they rep- 
resent. What measure would a single person 
have to put forth in order to roll and swing all 
the immense masses of matter with so many dis- 
tinct and amazing velocities about their innu- 
merable centres? — this is really the question. And 
there is only one word that answers it. Infinite, 
says our struggling and vanquished arithmetic. 
Infinite, say our struggling and vanquished im- 
aginations. Whatever our theory as to the na- 
ture and source of force— whether we view it as 
eternal motion or as something lying back of 
motion and producing it or tending to produce 
it; whether as exclusively the property of Deity, 
or as inhering in all mind and matter, or as be- 
longing to matter only — there can be but one 
view taken of its dimensions as a sum total. 
They are unspeakable. They are awful. There 
is no natural idea connected with our astronomy, 
fruitful as it is in great ideas, which is more 
sublime than that of the astronomical forces re- 
garded as a unit. And yet if these forces are 
secondary altogether, and the true scientist is 



FORCES. 209 

obliged to add to them as their producers and 
controllers the forces of an Almighty Person, he 
is raised to a still loftier and vaster conception of 
the universe as a force. And this is my concep- 
tion. I know myself to be an original, free, and 
separate force. I have good reason for thinking 
that all men, as well as other voluntary beings, 
are as much original agents (originators of mo- 
tion or tendency to motion) as I am myself. This 
gives us a vast multitude of second causes or 
forces; and since phenomena also seem to flow 
from inanimate things as original sources, and as 
no positive ground for objecting to this seeming 
appears, I am disposed to make my list of original 
finite causes or agents infinite. But these causes 
are themselves both caused and governed by a 
First Cause who, from the nature of the case, is 
infinitely greater as a force than anything he has 
made. And if the total of creature-forces revealed 
in our astronomy is so wonderful in number, va- 
riety, and hugeness, how much more wonderful 
must be that creating and controlling force ! We 
call it Almighty. It is worthy of the name. 



XVI. POPULATIONS. 



1. EARTH. 

2. MARS. 

3. OTHER PLANETS. 

4. STELLAR REGIONS. 

5. CONTRASTED VIEWS. 

6. " MANY MANSIONS.'' 

7. THE CENSUS. 



POPULATIONS. 213 



XVI. POPULATIONS. 

"For what purpose," says Sir John Herschel, 
( ( are we to suppose such magnificent bodies scat- 
tered through the abyss of space ? Surely not to 
illumine our nights, which an additional moon of 
the thousandth part of our own world would do 
much better; not to sparkle as a pageant void of 
meaning and reality and to bewilder us among 
vain conjectures. Useful, it is true, they are to 
man as points of exact and permanent reference; 
but he must have studied astronomy to little pur- 
pose who can suppose man to be the only object 
of his Creator's care, or who does not see in the 
vast and wonderful apparatus around us provision 
for other races of animated beings. ' ' 

How populous our earth is with both vegeta- 
ble and animal life has been signally shown in 
the progress of modern research. We find the 
air, the lands, the waters swarming with incalcu- 
lable multitudes and varieties of brute life. And 
over all the swarming hosts, down through mi- 
croscopic nations of inconceivable smallness, rule 
some 1,400,000,000 of human beings. Our part 
of the heavens is wonderfully inhabited. 

How is it with the parts that look down upon 



214 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

us from the sky ? Our telescopes do not yet en- 
able us to answer this question directly, for they 
are not yet powerful enough to bring into view 
living beings or their works (if such exist) on 
even the nearest of the heavenly bodies. Still 
we are not without gleams of information. 

Notice the planet Mars. This world resem- 
bles the earth so closely in regard to main habit- 
able conditions that most creatures living here 
could live about equally well there. Land, wa- 
ter, and air, clouds, rains, and snows, continents, 
mountains, and plains, oceans, lakes, and rivers, 
day, night, and mean temperature answering to 
our own — Mars is really another earth, only on a 
somewhat smaller scale and with longer seasons. 
There seems no reason why, if our animated tribes 
could be transferred to that next-door neighbor of 
ours, nearly all of them could not have habitats 
assigned to them that would agree very well with 
those they now occupy. When we cousider the 
amazing abundance of life with us, how every 
nook and corner of available field is, so to speak, 
seized upon and economized for the production 
and support of animated beings, how, at every 
shadow of opportunity, as it were, nature bursts 
forth like the waters of the Deluge in irresistible 
torrents of organic being, we cannot easily resist 
the pressure on us to believe that she uses her 



POPULATIONS. 215 

equal opportunities on Mars with equal prompt- 
ness and freedom. Here what would seem most 
unlikely places are packed with life almost to re- 
pletion. We can hardly individualize a cubic 
inch of air or water or dust anywhere without 
finding it expand under our glasses into a popu- 
lous empire. It looks as if an all-observing eye 
had been narrowly watching for an opportunity 
to edge in and wedge in as many living organ- 
isms as possible. In short, our uniform experi- 
ence in this world is to the effect that where life 
can be life is. So that one would have to resist 
the whole current of analogical inference, and the 
natural trend of thought and spontaneous logic, 
who, looking on such a beautiful globe of Mars 
as artists now fashion for us, and then mentally 
adding to it, one after another, the old rotation 
and the old cloud-laden atmosphere, and all the 
other old terrestrial facts which the telescope and 
spectroscope have warranted us in adding, until 
we see almost a perfect duplicate of our world as 
to main points, should refuse to complete the re- 
semblance to our earth by adding a vast and 
varied population. It may well be doubted 
whether any well-balanced and unsophisticated 
mind ever did this. For myself, I should be dis- 
appointed if, on landing in Mars, I should not 
find there the equivalents of men. 



2i6 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Almost as much can reasonably be said as to 
the planet Venus. What of the other planets of 
our system ? Must not their condition as to light 
and temperature, to say nothing of other matters, 
be such as to make life on them impossible? 
Think of Neptune, at whose distance the sun is 
only a star. Think of Mercury, to which the sun 
is sometimes ten times as large as it is to us. 
Yes; but then the temperature of a planet and 
the amount of light it has do not depend on the 
sun-distance alone ; they depend also much on 
the sort and depth of atmosphere the planet has, 
its condition as to clouds, the nature of its soil, 
and especially its condition as to internal fires. 
By changing the condition of the earth as to these 
matters, as we may suppose it to be changed, we 
could easily raise or depress its temperature and 
measure of light to almost any extent. By en- 
larging the pupil of the eye we could see as well 
with the light of Uranus, which, under the earth- 
conditions, is nearly that of a thousand moons at 
the full, as we do now; or, by contracting it to a 
tenth of its present size the visual brilliancy at 
Mercury would be reduced to that at the earth. 
So every planet in the system, for aught that ap- 
pears to the contrary, might be furnished with a 
climate and light suited to the terrestrial races. 
Some of these races are even now thriving in 



POPULATIONS. 217 

places as much without air and water as the 
moon need be supposed to be, in cold and dark- 
ness hardly less profound than is commonly sup- 
posed to belong to Neptune, in a heat and light 
hardly less intense than is commonly supposed to 
belong to Mercury. 

But why speak of terrestrial races — as if there 
could be no other forms of living being than such 
as are found in our world ! Who has a right to 
say either that God could not, or that he would 
not, make beings adapted to live and thrive in 
widely different physical conditions from our 
own ! Must all his living creatures be made 
after the earthly patterns ? Has the Omniscient 
and the Almighty such poverty of resources? 
Can he not make races that can live and flourish 
in the airless and waterless moon as well as we 
do here — as well even in the furnace of the sun, 
with its thousands of blazing equators, as we 
on our temperate zones? Could he not people 
worlds with pure spirits of any grade, which, 
from their very nature, would be independent of 
climate and other physical conditions? Could 
he not people them with beings whose ethereal 
bodies so closely border on the spiritual as to be 
almost independent of material surroundings? 
Nay, could he not so fashion and temper such 
gross materials as compose our own bodies as to 



2i8 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

suit them to a vigorous and enjoyable life in 
worlds vastly different from our own and in 
which we would immediately perish? Why 
could not an Infinite Being give as large a va- 
riety in physical life as in cosmical conditions: 
why is not the one field as large and as open to 
him as the other ? Certainly, a priori, there is 
nothing in diversity of cosmical circumstances 
to hinder our believing that other worlds are 
abodes of living beings. 

Notice under what widely different conditions 
life exists on the earth. It is found at the bottom 
of the ocean under almost infinite tons of pres- 
sure and with no appreciable light or air. Some 
animals must live in the air only, others in the 
water only, still others in both air and water. 
Some cannot live in the heat, and some cannot 
live in the cold; some can hardly have too much 
light, nor others too much darkness. Fluctuations 
of temperature that would destroy some plants 
and animals give vigor and stature and hard- 
ihood to others. Tropical life basks deliciously 
in sunbeams that would kill outright the Arctic; 
and Arctic fauna disport amid snows and ices and 
cutting blasts that would thrill the children of 
the equator into stone. Things that are poison 
to some forms of life are nourishing and necessary 
food to others. Minute animals are found thri- 



POPULATIONS. 219 

ving in strong acids that would instantly kill 
and consume many similar organisms. That 
quiet of the elements that is essential to the en- 
joyment, and even existence, of some animals 
must become tumults and wrestlings and storms 
to suit the taste and even the needs of others. 
The exhalations and gases that debilitate and 
annihilate one species are the very breath of life 
to another. Of late years we hkve been surprised 
to find how great a heat many microscopic eggs 
and seeds will bear without losing what is called 
their vitality — a fact very suggestive of what real 
vitality may sustain. The fable of the incom- 
bustible salamander finds much in actual fact to 
keep it in countenance. The three Hebrews 
walked unharmed in the midst of furnace-fires 
by force of miracle; by force of natural structure 
and adaptation volcano-fish in countless numbers 
dwell close about the heart of furnaces a hundred- 
fold hotter. We even have examples of life sus- 
tained without food, without stomach or head or 
any other assignable member, and even without 
any structure at all. 

What a wide variety of mutually contradic- 
tory and, to a first view, seemingly impossible 
conditions of life ! Does this variety suddenly 
come to an end just where our vision happens 
to do so? Pray, what reason have we for sup- 



220 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

posing that the only possible forms of living 
being must be somewhat like those found in this * 
world? It certainly would be very unwise in me 
to argue from what I cannot bear to what another 
cannot, or from what one species cannot bear to 
what other species cannot, or from what all the 
sorts of living beings on the earth cannot bear to 
what those in other worlds cannot. For one, I 
have no idea that this little earth has exhausted 
either the invention or the power of the Creator. 
Who, in view of the wonderful fertility of resource 
displayed here, would venture to say that it is 
impossible, or even unlikely, that Almighty God 
should organise living beings of a high order 
whose natural and most felicitous home would be 
in even the terrible glories of the sun ? The same 
power that made the seven-fold furnace at Baby- 
lon for a time harmless to three men could easily 
made the thousand-fold furnace that heats and 
cheers our solar system a permanent home and 
brilliant paradise of enjoyment to other specially- 
organised beings. We may at least say that, in 
view of the scantiness of our knowledge as to the 
foundation mystery of both matter and spirit; in 
view of the revealed fact that there are bodiless 
spirits, and of the scientific fact that there are 
etherealised forms of matter that border on spirit; 
also in view of the immense surprises to which 



POPULATIONS. 221 

science now frequently treats us, showing what 
men have been wont to call the incredible and 
impossible as actual facts — I say, in view of such 
things, it would seem that no one has a right to 
affirm that any physical differences that may exist 
among the heavenly bodies interpose any shadow 
of objection to their being, every one of them, 
the homes of intelligent beings of even as high 
order as man. If there is any positive reason for 
thinking that they are, in general, such homes, 
there is nothing that we know about them, or are 
likely to know about them, to interpose a nega- 
tive, however feeble. On the contrary, the fact 
that in no one of the innumerable earth-situa- 
tions, as extreme and unlikely to support life as 
can exist on other planets as the result of sun- 
distance (for example, situations without air or 
water or light or perceptible heat), do we, so far 
as we have examined, fail to find a crowded life, 
invites us by a mighty induction to believe that 
the planets are peopled, and that a God of infinite 
resources shows as vast a variety in his living 
creatures as he does in his dead materialisms. 

The same considerations of course apply to the 
other planetary systems belonging to the fixed 
stars. We know nothing of these systems save 
what the analogies of our own system suggest. 
But it is infinitely unlikely that among the count* 

Celestial Empires. 15 



222 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

less millions of those far-away systems, with suns 
and general structure strongly resembling our 
own, there are not some, nay, very many, worlds 
whose physical conditions are substantially like 
those of this world and could sustain the same 
forms of life. As to the others, however w T idely 
they may differ from our home, the difference 
does not, considering w T hat God is and what w r e 
see about us, put a straw of difficulty in the way 
of our admitting that they all mean inhabited 
worlds. The Infinite One can easily match the 
varied palaces by as varied populations. The 
look of our own world is that He not only can do 
it, but is likely to have done it. All the currents 
of terrestrial and astronomical analogy sweep our 
thought in that direction. Whatever reason there 
is for believing that stars mean as many groups of 
circling planets is good for believing that planets 
mean habitations. 

I would not venture to say that all the orbs of 
space are at present occupied by living beings. 
Some of them may be only in course of prepara- 
tion for such occupancy. Nor would I venture to 
say that there are not some orbs which will never 
be so occupied, but will serve merely as sources 
of light and heat and control to inhabited worlds. 
Such may be our sun and those other suns that 
we call the fixed stars. But that they all are not 



POPULATIONS. 223 

a sort of lord-mayor's show, not mere fireworks of 
the Almighty, not a mere empty pageant gotten 
lip by an infinite showman on an infinite parade- 
ground to dazzle the eyes of men, but vast worlds 
created and maintained for the sake of the living 
beings to whom they furnish suitable homes, can- 
not reasonably be questioned by a Christian theist. 
He believes that God made all the worlds. He 
believes that God had an object in making them. 
And he learns from the Scriptures that this object, 
so far as our earth is concerned, was population. 
For he made it to be inhabited. How natural and 
matter of course to conclude that those other 
worlds out in space, so like our own, have a like 
object, especially when we find ourselves unable 
to conceive of any other object equally worthy. 
The living beings of the creation are plainly its 
noblest part; indeed, lifeless masses of matter, 
however great and wisely put together, belong to 
an unspeakably lower plane ; it cannot but be 
that the vastly less worthy should be for the sake 
and service of the other. How unlikely that God 
has confined the nobler part of his creation to a 
world so inconsiderable and unelaborate as com- 
pared with many worlds, if not most! How much 
greater and grander is Saturn with its eight moons 
and wonderful rings ! How much more brilliant 
the sky that arches the planets of some multiple 



224 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

star with its various hues ! Most astronomers, not 
to say all, confess to the impression that our earth 
is one of the smallest and least favored in its out- 
ward furnishings of all the orbs of space. Cer- 
tainly our sun, vast and bright as it is, is greatly 
outshone in sue and beauty by hosts of other 
suns, and it is not unreasonable to infer that the 
trains of these monarchs and the armies which 
they rule are correspondingly superior. Would 
God be likely to stock to repletion with his choi- 
cest works this world and leave far grander .spheres 
totally vacant of them ? To suppose it would be 
repeating the old error of Ptolemy in supposing 
the earth to contain the pivot and throne of the 
material creation. If we make it the only in- 
habited world we make it the grandest and most 
pivotal world in all the universe of God, for it is 
both centre and circumference of the living uni- 
verse of creatures. 

If we suppose that the worlds at large are for 
living beings, and especially for intelligent and 
moral beings, we at once rise to a most glorious 
and awe-inspiring conception of God and his em- 
pire. What populations! What multitudinous 
subjects as we pass from planet to planet, from 
system to system, from firmament to firmament ! 
We are confounded by the breadth and splendor 
of an empire whose smallest miracle is in its acre- 



POPULATIONS* 225 

age. And if those innumerable populations cul- 
minate in innumerable sons, loyal and happy sons 
of God (as we cannot but hope they do from the 
fact that the great redemptive sacrifice was made 
in this world), what new and gorgeous splendors 
are added to the august scene and realm of the 
Eternal! On the other hand, if we suppose* all 
the worlds save this vacant of population both 
now and for evermore — great lifeless wastes of 
materialism stretching aw r ay into the infinites — 
without intelligence, without goodness, without 
even happiness or the possibility of it, we are 
oppressed by a sense of boundless waste and inap- 
titude and failure. As we go outward among the 
worlds and find nothing but an archipelago of 
shining deserts uncheered by the presence of a 
single living thing, there gradually comes upon 
us the sense of a mighty abortion ; behold infi- 
nite statues left in the rough, infinite foundations 
without superstructure, infinite ships rotting on 
the original tramways, infinite palaces fit for 
kings without a solitary inmate, infinite thrones 
and nobody to sit on them, infinite navies trav- 
ersing the seas and never a soul on board ! Who 
can believe it that believes in the doctrine of 
chances ? Who can believe it that believes in a 
designing Maker ? Nay, who can believe it that 
believes that the worlds were naturally evolved 



226 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

out of an undesigning fire-mist? For the same 
rigid and unalterable natural conditions and forces 
that, in the process, of the ages, have given such 
a world as this with its crowded and wondrous 
life, must be presumed to reach at last the same 
issues on the same path all through the heavens. 
If our primal fire-mist was enforced by stress of 
its own blind potencies and laws from stage to 
stage of improvement till at last it flowered into 
Platos and Newtons, must not this be accepted as 
expressing the nature and history of the other 
fire-mists which have gradually worked their way 
up into suns and systems like our own ? They 
are evidently at least on their way to organic life, 
if they have not yet arrived at that goal. Hav- 
ing got so far on a course like our own, they are 
bound to go farther, to go until at last, under the 
irresistible pressure of the blind excelsior princi- 
ple within, they come out on the lofty summits 
of conscious, intelligent, and moral being. And if 
the living races on the earth have not yet reached 
the limit of their advance, but, as is claimed, are 
still being pushed upward by the blessed though 
blind instinct of improvement which hides in all 
matter, then we are bound to presume that in 
multitudes of the celestial orbs the process of im- 
provement has advanced much farther than it 
has with us, and " survival of the fittest" or some 



POPULATIONS. 227 

other ancient and blind schoolmaster gives angels 
instead of men. 

All this in the light of the fact that the Bible 
tells us of many living persons other than men. 
God's holy angels in endless hosts, and the spir- 
its of saved men have their proper homes on glo- 
rious materialisms somewhere out yonder in the 
profound of space. And somewhere, too, in that 
mysterious beyond are found the homes of Satan, 
his evil angels, and the lost souls of dead men. 
Each class of abodes may consist of many worlds; 
each certainly contains a vast population. 

"In my Father's house are many mansions." 
Why may not the scriptural heaven consist of many 
worlds, and some of these heavenly spheres be 
among those seen glittering on our nightly sky? 
Are they too far apart to allow of that close in- 
tercourse with one another which is essential to 
our idea of heaven ? We have had within a few 
years some very instructive hints as to what is 
possible in the way of eliminating factors of space 
and time from human problems, and that without 
lending ear in the least to the marvels of clairvoy- 
ance. As we are transported from place to place 
on the wings of the wind ; as we write and talk free- 
ly in a moment across continents; as, by means of 
a glass, w r e instantaneously project our gaze across 
whole universes of new space, we find it easy to 



228 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

imagine that even such spaces as part the stars 
from one another may be practically no intervals 
at all to a higher order of being than ourselves, or 
even to ourselves in a higher state. " There is 
nothing fleeter than light" — what scientific man 
dares to say that? Nothing in what we know of 
nature forbids a swiftness as much greater than 
that of light as that is greater than the swiftness 
of a bird. Just as a ship may outstrip vastly the 
waves of the sea which it traverses, so a spirit 
may vastly outstrip the light waves of the ether 
(if such is your theory) through which it cleaves 
its w r ay. Angels may flash through stellar inter- 
vals as quickly and easily as we can step into our 
nearest neighbor's house; may see and hear and 
converse through such intervals by their ow r n 
unaided senses better than w r e do by the aid of 
telescope, telegraph, and telephone across prov- 
inces or even across the street. So the "many 
mansions' ' of heaven may mean a multitude of 
inhabited worlds which for all purposes of visita- 
tion and fellowship are practically as near to 
one another as are the cities of the same coun- 
try, or even as the contiguous homes of the same 
village. Nay, the Bible teaches that there ever 
has been, and now is, such a free passing to and 
fro between heaven and earth as is inconsistent 
with the idea that the space between is of much 



POPULATIONS. 229 

account as an obstruction. "Are they not all 
ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them 
who shall be heirs of salvation?" 

The same tenor of argument that would lead 
us to expect living beings in distant worlds would 
lead us to expect at their head beings answering 
to man, that crown and fulfilment of animated 
nature in this world, that is to say, beings capa- 
ble of knowing, honoring, and freely serving their 
Maker. The same reasons that led God to crown 
his work here with such beings would be likely 
to lead him to do the same yonder. And for one, 
I should be disappointed if, on being transferred 
to the region of any fixed star, I should not find 
it, not only w T ith planets and the planets them- 
selves populous with living beings, but also find 
these living beings presided over by some akin in 
their powers and possibilities to man. Especially 
should I be disappointed in not finding such high- 
er life, or a course of preparation for it, in those 
more glorious and elaborate systems with their 
many-colored suns in the presence of which our 
solar system is quite insignificant. Nay, I should 
rather expect to find on those ampler and grander 
globes a still grander type of intelligent and 
moral being than appears here. So, no doubt, 
would any one moderately conversant with as- 
tronomical facts who should allow his thought to 



230 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

float freely along on the current of their hints, 
analogies, and verisimilitudes. That can have 
but one direction. It is towards a belief in a 
broad universe of highly-organised and moral 
intelligences. To think of passing planet after 
planet, system after system, firmament after fir- 
mament, without meeting anything better than 
solitudes or the voices of brutes ! Both the na- 
ture within us and the nature without us look at 
us forbiddingly. 

We certainly live in the midst of a grandly- 
peopled as well as grandly-constructed universe — 
whether we trust to the revelation that is both 
Scripture and science or to that evolution scheme 
that is neither. But who shall take the census 
of yon far-stretching heavens ? What record- 
books could hold it or tongue utter it or thought 
think it? Do I mean human thought? O Ga- 
briel, canst thou grasp that in the presence of 
which our figures grow pale ? There is One who 
knows by name all the rank and file of the glit- 
tering hosts that make our astronomy — nay, all 
the rank and file of the living organisms that 
bloom or move on their crowded surfaces; but 
then his name is nothing less than Omniscience. 
Our thoughts labor, our thoughts falter, our 
thoughts fall by the way and lie gasping, ex- 
hausted, despairing on the very threshold of an 



POPULATIONS. 231 

attempt to find their way to the great total of 
even those enormous spheres which have rolled 
forth from the Creator's hand. Will they even 
dare to look towards such an undertaking as asks 
for each individual life on all these thronged and 
glittering homes! And yet men sometimes attack 
the impossible. Great problems that long seemed 
far beyond human power have been solved, so 
that at last our venturesomeness has become very 
great; and perhaps we may be allowed to fancy 
that some one may be found hardy enough to 
face and strain at even so great a problem as this ; 
"How many are the subjects of Jehovah in all 
the worlds?" He bends away at his thinking; 
he tries to push outward the walls of his under- 
standing and fancy; he invokes endless factors of 
time, patience, and zeal to plume his efforts to 
put a girdle of conception about the whole great 
universe of celestial populations. Does he suc- 
ceed ? Does he long dream of succeeding ? Ica- 
rus mounts; but the suns are too strong for his 
wings of wax. He falls e'er he has well begun 
his journey. And not if he had worn the talaria 
of Iris or Hermes, not if the tornado pinions of 
Michael the prince had beat fire on his helmet 
and sandals, could he have gone on to complete 
the round of that sublime orbit, or even made 
any appreciable advance upon it. Nothing short 



232 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

of a divine wing can accomplish such a journey. 
That wing can at once flash a radiant path about 
the whole universe; nay, is itself broad enough to 
cover with its glowing canopy the entire un- 
speakable area of being from centre to circumfer- 
ence. Does not such a wing belong to him of 
whom it can truly be said, " He telleth the num- 
ber of the stars; he calleth them all by their 
names, " " Neither is there any creature that is 
not manifest in his sight; but all things are 
naked and opened to the eyes of him with whom 
we have to do "? So it seems that God knows 
not merely all the worlds, not merely all the liv- 
ing beings on all the worlds, but also all the cir- 
cumstances and affairs of every individual of all 
these abysmal populations. So he is qualified to 
be what he is, viz. , a universal Providence. But 
we, in our conscious nothingness in the presence 
of such knowledge, what can we do but exclaim 
with the sage and seer, "When I consider the 
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and 
the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man 
that thou art mindful of him?" 

Such a view of the grandeur of the peopled 
universe over which God presides is certainly 
well fitted to promote humility in us as being a 
very insignificant part of the whole. But does it 
follow, as some would have us think, that such a 



POPULATIONS. 233 

world as ours is relatively too trifling to receive 
such an outlay of divine attention as the Scrip- 
tures assert? Doubtless, if God were like man, 
there would be a difficulty here. With us diffu- 
sion, beyond a certain point, means lack of thor- 
oughness. In grasping quantity we often sacri- 
fice quality. We enlarge our farms and pauper- 
ize our farming. We undertake many sciences 
and become sciolists. We broaden our landscape 
and lose sight of its details. Such is man. If 
one has only a small quantity of gold it has to be 
spread out thin to cover a great surface. But 
what if there is no end to the precious metal? 
Do not let us commit the exceeding folly of ap- 
plying human limitations to God. He is the In- 
finite, the Unconditioned. In thinking of what 
he can do we must altogether discount considera- 
tions of number and magnitude and distance. It 
is as easy for him to do for a million as for one, 
to do for the innumerable as for the million. 
The Being who with one hand sowed immensity 
with monster spheres, and with the other fash- 
ioned the exquisite microcosms of animalcules 
visible only in the most potential magnifier, is 
not one to whom our thought can say, " Thus 
far shalt thou come and no farther." Attending 
to us does not compel him to scant attention on 
Jupiter or Alcyone. While he is pouring out on 



234 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

this world a notice and supervision that neglect 
nothing, however small, he is such a Being that 
he can do the same with infinite ease on every 
one of the countless worlds that are gathered 
within the unutterable round of the Ultimate 
System. Instead of exclaiming, with look of 
perplexity and incredulity, ' ' How can it be that 
this little earth has had so much attention from 
the Sovereign of such vast celestial empires!" we 
should exclaim, " What a glorious thing it is that 
a Being exists who does not have to neglect the 
small in order to attend to the great, who can 
look after the smallest interest on the least planet 
with as much ease and completeness as if that 
were the only object of his attention instead of 
sharing it with au infinite multitude, and who 
can not only pour himself out to any extent as a 
knowledge and power through all the realms of 
maxima and minima at one and the same mo- 
ment, but whose nature includes a demonstration 
that such a feat, eternally repeated, would be no 
tax whatever on his resources !" 

It is but scientific to remember how liable 
men must be to misjudge the measures of a Being 
whose plans have respect to so broad a universe. 
Ought one to pronounce with confidence on a 
matter of which he sees only some insignificant 
angle? Are we not used to saying that a judge 



POPULATIONS. 235 

must have faculty to look, and take time to look, 
at his cases on all sides ? But how shall a man 
look at all sides of a measure of an infinite ad- 
ministration, every act of which is taken with 
reference to every possible interest in space and 
time? 

Are you tempted to think, with a certain 
Spanish Alphonso, that if you had been present 
at the creation you could have suggested an im- 
provement?— that it would have been better if 
God had been revealed to us daily in a visible 
personal form of transcendent glory; that it would 
have been better to have no moral system at all 
than one including the present amount of sin and 
suffering; that it would have been better if the 
arts and sciences which have come to us so slowly 
and laboriously had been given complete to the 
race at its outset by direct revelation ; that it 
would have been better if this or that feature of 
the Bible had been omitted or modified; that it 
would have been better if angels rather than men 
had been employed as heralds of the gospel; that 
*" it would have been better if further information 
had been given us about the future state, the 
mysteries of free-will and divine foreknowledge 
and foreordination, the origin of moral evil, the 
reconciliation of prayer with law and of religion 
with science? Take thought for a moment. 



236 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

Think how measures of legislation that bear hard 
on one part of a country are often found salutary, 
and even essential, to the great country as a whole. 
Think how punishments that sacrifice the indi- 
vidual are essential to the salvation of society. 
Think how in all the walks of business partial 
and temporary ills have to be accepted as the con- 
ditions of large and final success; and of what our 
experience teaches us as to the necessity of gener- 
al laws and of some incidental evils. Especially 
think how nothing is more common than for that 
which at first seems adverse or wrong to prove in 
course of time to be neither, but to be even dis- 
guised prosperity and righteousness. And then 
think how unspeakably vast is that empire of God 
to all parts of which his arrangements must have 
wise respect, and how impossible it must be for 
such faculties as ours to grasp them in all their 
bearings so as to see for ourselves their propriety. 
The best God can do for us is to affirm this pro- 
priety, and ask us to put faith in the affirmation. 
We should say to ourselves, "It cannot but be 
that God's management of so vast a scheme of 
things should sometimes seem to us not merely 
obscure, but even positively unwise and unright- 
eous. We must count on now and then finding 
laws which through our gimlet-holes of vision 
seem unwholesome, providences that seem the 



POPULATIONS. 22)7 

reverse of just and loving, doctrines that seem to 
frown on reason and truth." It will not always 
be so. All the great things belonging to this 
wide divine administration will not be made 
mysterious or wrong-looking by our extremely 
fractional view of them. Far from it. A golden 
shield, however vast its orb, will seem golden at 
many points to a sound eye. The fractions of the 
divine government thafcwe see are often (may I 
not say generally ?) as golden in their look as one 
could desire. But once in a while the eye falls on 
a spot where the light shines feebly, on a depres- 
sion in the sculptured and pictured surface where 
shadows hide, on some ragged moon-edge where 
light and darkness contend together and which 
pricks our sight back into the arms of faith. 
And faith says, (( It is only a seeming. If we 
could only see the matter on all sides and in all 
its bearings we should be quite satisfied. It be- 
longs to an infinite scheme of wisdom and benev- 
olence, and only seems unwise to us because we 
see only a small part of its relations. Trust the 
All-Father — trust him. It is necessary for little 
children to walk by faith in their parents. Would 
it not be preposterous for the little son of a great 
statesman (the child is only just beginning to walk 
and talk) to take it upon him to criticise the far- 
reaching plans and measures on which his father 
16 



238 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

conducts the affairs of an empire? And must not 
the wisest and most salutary of these measures 
often seem otherwise to the little critic from his 
low standpoint, to such untaught eyes as his, and 
to eyes that can take in only so small a part of 
the circumstances of the case ? With what mod- 
esty then should we, God's little ones, venture to 
pronounce on the ways of divine providence — on 
the statesmanship of that^Pather-King whose em- 
pire casts orbit about such an amazing sum of be- 
ings and interests I n 



XVII. MYSTERIES. 



1. SPACE. 

2. DURATION. 

3. SPIRIT. 

4. MATTER. 

5. FORCE. 

6. ORGANISMS. 

7. NATURE. 

8. GOD. 





MULTIPLE STARS. 





NUCLEATED NEBULAE. 




OMEGA CENTAURI, WITH COUNTLESS STARS. 



MYSTERIES. 241 



XVII. MYSTERIES. 

One of the most signal facts emphasised to us 
by the study of the astronomical universe is its 
mysteriousness. We stand, as it were, in the heart 
of an immense fog through which at great inter- 
vals a few strong lights succeed in struggling. 

Of the things just about us we know only a 
very small part, and our knowledge of the things 
we are said to know is exceedingly fractional and 
superficial. Our intelligence is like a bird which 
alights on a twig here and there and picks up a 
seed. The nearest and most familiar thing we 
see has an unexplored interior which is the de- 
spair of our science. But as the distance of an 
object from us increases, the proportion of the 
known to the unknown rapidly diminishes. 
Whole estates, provinces, continents come to be 
hardly more than names. How little is known 
of Africa and the polar regions and the ocean 
depths and the deep interior of the planet ! Our 
dredgings, the chippings and borings of our geol- 
ogists, the corkscrew peerings of our microscop- 
ists, have merely crossed with a farthing candle 
the threshold of vast realms still buried in pro- 
found darkness. How little is understood of that 



24-2 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

familiar complex which we call the weather, or of 
that annual miracle of nature, restoration, which 
greets our eyes in the spring! It certainly is only 
an inappreciable fraction of our own planet that 
we can be said to know or to be able to know or 
to have any prospects of ever being able to know. 
How much smaller a fraction of the truths 
contained in the solar system falls within the 
scope of our opportunity and intelligence ! And 
as our thought goes out to still remoter systems, 
how dwindles the trifle at every step — much faster 
than the square of the distance increases — till at 
last we come to a profound of darkness unallevi- 
ated by a single ray ! Is that star some 60,000 
years of light- travel away ? Yet still beyond may 
stretch infinite amplitudes of creation, unknown 
and, for the present at least, unknowable. On 
the whole, what we know are less than the stray 
sparks of a mighty conflagration. As a whole 
the universe is a Sphinx. Facts known are few ; 
imaginations are more ; the unimaginables are, 
beyond compare, the most. Such heights and 
depths of the unintelligible, such far -sweeping 
horizons and huge spheres of incomprehensibil- 
ity, such ample field for even an immortality of 
lightning -eyed and lightning -paced investiga- 
tion — there is at least one nebula that does not 
shine by its own light or by any other. 



MYSTERIES. 243 

But let us look at this great mystery more 
closely. Space, the great astronomic theatre it- 
self, the roomy region in which all the stars dwell 
and move, stretching away on all sides of us not 
only beyond any assignable limit, but into abso- 
lute endlessness, along whose diameter thought 
at its fleetest may fly for ever without once doub- 
ling on its track, is certainly a great mystery in 
itself. Who has mastered the idea of infinite, 
necessary space? It is an impregnable castle 
that defies all our philosophy. From the begin- 
ning giants have been beating and summoning at 
its barred gates and trying to scale its frowning 
walls of solid shadows and midnights, but the last 
man is just as far from success as was the first. 
By this time we ought to know and do know that 
its interior is hopelessly inaccessible to such minds 
as ours. That which is incontestably real, whose 
existence as a mighty fact forces itself, beyond the 
possibility of rejection, on the knowledge of all, 
but the nearest wall of which our intelligence has 
never passed and never can pass, certainly deserves 
to be called a mystery. 

But our astronomy has as close relation to infi- 
nite duration as it has to infinite space. Infinite 
space itself inhabits eternity. The stars inhabit 
both of these shadowy mansions as nothing on the 
earth does. Bach earthly thing, of course, exists 



244 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

in space and time; but how small a part of either 
does it occupy ! Its place is but a point amid the 
endless regions about it, its time (that during 
which it remains the same thing) but a moment 
amid outlying eternities. But the stars occupy 
and reign in space and duration more largely and 
durably than any other objects of physical sci- 
ence. Even the soul of man is inferior in this 
respect ; for though, in common with the stellar 
hosts, it may be expected to inherit all the future, 
it inhabits infinitely less than they of the past. 
For aught that appears, all space is populous with 
worlds ; for aught that appears, there never has 
been and never will be a moment without the 
presence in it of created worlds. The uncreated 
and indestructible amphitheatre of duration in 
which the stars run their courses, and the absence 
of which is inconceivable, is equally august and 
infinite with that of space and equally unintel- 
ligible. They are twin mysteries — great cloudy 
homes within whose coincident and sublime ar- 
chitectures dwell all other mysteries, all created 
nature, and even the supernatural. 

The contents of mysterious space and duration 
are partly matter. What is matter? We have 
our definitions of it, but they do not let us into 
the secret of its substance. Is it infinitely divisi- 
ble? — a question often asked and never settled. 



MYSTERIES. 245 

Of how many sorts is it ? Once men said four ; 
now they say more than sixty ; by-and-by, per- 
haps, they will say more than a hundred, but 
more likely one. Matter was created, say we the- 
its — something out of nothing. Here is a mys- 
tery. Matter was created, we say; but when? If 
any one can answer more definitely than the Bible 
does, in the beginning, he is more knowing than 
the rest of mankind. Was all matter created at 
one time, or did it appear at great intervals, and 
will there yet be creations from time to time? Has 
matter ever been annihilated ? Some venture to 
say No; but they are either those who say that it 
has never been created, or they mean that it 
never ceases to be by means of natural forces and 
processes. Does God ever reduce matter to its 
primal nothingness ? No answer. 

In connection with matter we find a something 
easily seen to be much higher in its nature, around 
whose brightness even thicker veils seem to be 
drawn. I mean spirit, whether human or brutal. 
The last distinction between it and matter: its 
relation to form, size, space, organization; the tie 
that binds it to the body; their interactions; why 
the human spirit is not able to directly discern 
itself or discover its own exact situation in the 
body; the genesis of thought, feeling, choice; the 
philosophy of sleep and dreams; instincts, hered- 



246 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ity ; the metaphysics of free-will, responsibility, 
and immortality — all such matters, however spec- 
ulated and dogmatized upon, suggest not only no 
end of hard questions, but no end of questions 
whose answers are as far beyond sight as is the 
remotest star. 

Whether there are things besides matter and 
spirit that go to make up the substance of the uni- 
verse, and if so, what and how many they are, 
who can tell? It certainly is possible that our 
present senses and consciousness cover only a 
small part of the constitution of nature. As there 
may be other kinds of matter than those at pres- 
ent known, as there may be other kinds of spirit 
than those we have happened to notice within 
our narrow beat, so there may be other kinds of 
substance than the spiritual and material, other 
kinds now known to higher natures than ours, or 
to ourselves when some dormant faculty shall 
awake and slip leashes. There is room for such 
discoveries in the great cosmos. Experience even 
seems to hint and feebly promise them. But they 
are Delphic promises — nebulae whose interior no 
telescope can sound. 

Force — what is it ? The word is on the lips 
of all men; science just now swears by it; all 
nature is quick with the thing itself; some of its 
forms, laws, and relations are known; but who can 



MYSTERIES. 247 

be said to know the last essence of force ? Des- 
pite the endless discussions from time out of mind, 
we cannot yet tell what that is in a thing which 
enables it to act on itself or something else — ena- 
bles it to produce motion or tendency to motion, 
change or tendency to change — what it is and 
how it brings itself to bear on its object. We 
speak of chemical forces and vital forces, of the 
forces of gravity and electricity and magnetism 
and heat and spirit, indicating different classes 
of effects from which causes w T orthy of at least 
different names are inferred; but what that some- 
thing is w r hich is common to all these forces and 
makes them such, and what that is which dis- 
criminates the essence of one force from another, 
nobody knows, not even he who says that all force 
is motion and that various forces are only various 
modes of motion. Even he will be ready to ad- 
mit that causation, especially on the astronomic 
field and in the endless intertwinings and entan- 
glements and strifes of the celestial motions, is full 
of unresolvable problems. Can we answer such 
questions as one can ask about gravity ? Does it 
act at infinite distance from its seat ? Is a medi- 
um essential to its action on remote objects? 
Were a particle or a world created, would its 
attraction be felt at once in all parts of the uni- 
verse? In whatever way such questions are 



248 CELESTIAI, EMPIRES. 

viewed they cry mystery at both ears. There 
are mysteries enough in the doctrine of causation 
alone to keep scientific thought on the stretch till 
the day of judgment. 

Ascending to the realm of the organic, we find 
ourselves in the presence of perhaps still pro- 
founder problems. Whatever we have learned 
of the structure and functions of vegetable and 
animal bodies still leaves them greatly in the 
dark. The mere words, life, death, growth, repro- 
duction, what a nest and nexus of perplexities and 
impossible solutions do they suggest to us ! Yet 
they stand for matters that have been in the focus 
of all eyes and thoughts from the beginning. The 
last foundations of heredity, the structural ter- 
mini of species, stature, growth-period, and life, 
how wholly blind is our science as yet, and likely 
to be, in all such matters. 

How many atoms compose the earth, in view 
of such facts as that a single grain of copper can 
be shown to be composed of at least 100,000,000 
of atoms ! To the infinite number making a 
globe 8,000 miles in diameter add as many infi- 
nites as there are globes in the whole heavens. 
Now you have a number which you can talk 
about and gather within the shining tentaculae of 
poetical description; but as to any proper mental 
grasping of such an abyss of figures it cannot be 



MYSTERIES. 249 

done. So in looking at the sky we stand face to 
face with the mystery of incalculable and endless 
number. 

This has already been incidentally noticed, 
as has also an equal mystery of size. On the 
earth we find things mysteriously small; in the 
heavens things mysteriously large. Here we 
have not merely inanimate atoms that are incon- 
ceivably minute, but also living beings furnished 
with all the organs of sense in the highest per- 
fection and yet barely visible, as so organized, 
under a microscope magnifying 250,000 times. 
And how far may even these living infinitesimals 
be from the last minims of animated nature ! On 
the other hand, peering up through the night, 
we discover a world to which our earth is almost 
a nothing — 12,000,000,000 times greater — also a 
system of worlds within which could be packed 
away, at average star-distances from one another 
the cube of that number of such spheres; nay, a 
system that actually embraces within its glorious 
rotund the whole materialism and spiritualism of 
the universe. There is magnitude for you — a 
magnitude that is confounding, magnitude that 
is a mystery. Try your powers upon it and con- 
fess their inadequacy. You can do nothing. 
You are lost. Yet not more so than when, re- 
signing telescope and telescopic imagination, you 



250 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

take up the microscope and, fancy-aided, carry 
your observation down among miracles of small- 
ness. How far apart these extremes, both equal- 
ly wonderful ! On the one hand nature swelling 
into immeasurable hugeness, on the other dwin- 
dling into immeasurable littleness. 

When the ancients wished to express a vast 
difference they said, toto orbe. But their orb was 
not much. We find in the astronomic field as 
now known to us a much stronger figure at our 
service. What an interval parts us from the 
nearest of the heavenly bodies ! How much 
greater still the space between us and the nearest 
fixed star, and especially from the last star that 
appears in the field of the largest telescope ! And 
yet what inexpressible distances beyond even that 
lie the frontiers of nature ! We talk freely of 
such distances, but who of us understands them? 
We marshal long lines of figures whose unit it- 
self is enormous beyond comprehension, and try 
by various comparisons to gain some faint con- 
ception of what the whole amounts to; but the 
baffling figures seem to laugh at and mock us as 
they stream away and at last disappear in the 
depths of distance and endless fog. No one has 
tried to give some just idea of the larger astro- 
nomical distances without feeling the utter inad- 
equacy of speech or symbol to faithfully represent 



MYSTERIES. 251 

them. We are forced to content ourselves with 
some glittering generalities, with flashing out 
into the night some colored rocket of poetical 
description, and are glad of the momentary gleam, 
though it does make more sensible the greatness 
of the darkness. No doubt it will always be so. 
Thought in attempting to leap such chasms can- 
not but fall infinitely short of its mark, and so 
fall into an abyss of confusion. However far our 
science may advance and culture expand our 
powers they will still have to exclaim with aston- 
ished eyes and hands, and discouragement painted 
in every feature, Oh, those mysterious distances ! 
The simple transfer of an object from one 
place to another by a physical agent in immedi- 
ate connection with it is not commonly thought 
to be mysterious. But when the motion takes 
place without any such agent, or without any 
sensible medium of connection with such agent; 
when the motion is seen to affect everything, so 
that there is not an atom of matter at absolute 
rest in all nature, or even at rest relatively to the 
other atoms of the same body, and even so that it 
is by no means the easiest thing in the world to 
disprove the hypothesis that every object, how- 
ever dense and rigid it may seem, consists of 
atoms revolving in orbits about their common 
centre of gravity at intervals from one another 



252 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

relatively as great as those between tlie members 
of the solar system; when the motion is seen to 
be incessant as well as universal, and sometimes 
at the rate of more than 180,000 miles a second; 
when it means the transfer through space of huge 
worlds and huger systems of worlds at the rate 
of, say, from 50,000 to 1,200,000 miles an hour; 
when such a motion as this is combined with a 
thousand other motions woven together inex- 
tricably and yet never interfering with one an- 
other and separately calculable, as when a moon 
moves on its axis, also around its planet, also 
around the sun, also around the sun's centre of 
revolution, and so on indefinitely; when each of 
these motions has superimposed on it myriads of 
other motions called perturbations, which struggle 
towards all points of the compass — we find our- 
selves as much lost in this vast wilderness of mo- 
tions as ever was traveller in new lands or babes 
in a wood. So many questions can be asked 
about them that science cannot answer nor hope 
to answer. What endless mazes ! How the shut- 
tles fly through the heavens in all directions, 
weaving out, we know not how, law and order 
and stability ! Who can disentangle the threads 
that make up the wondrous web ? Where is Ari- 
adne ? Astronomy is helpless and hopeless in the 
presence of such labyrinths. 



MYSTERIES. 2$Z 

As a consequence of these mysterious motions 
we have , an incessant change going on in the 
aspect of the sky. A chart of the sky as the first 
terrestrial animals saw it would differ very con- 
siderably from one now made. Our earth has a 
constant movement of translation through space, 
so that the place which it now occupies it has 
never occupied before and will never occupy 
again. As much is true of every other heavenly 
body. So there is a gradual change in the posi- 
tions of all the stars relative to one another, mys- 
teriously less than one would expect, considering 
the enormousness of the celestial motions, but real 
and one that must at last tell on the general aspect 
of the sky. But from the nature of the case this 
change is infinitely beyond calculation. If we 
knew tljat gravity controlled all these movements 
the task would be hopeless; how much more when 
we do not know but that there are many other 
forces with different laws in operation. Individ- 
ual items of this change we can perceive and 
measure; but the great sum total pours itself in 
such floods over the face of nature that we dare 
not venture to launch our exploring bark on any- 
thing but here and there a creek putting out from 
the great Atlantic. 

How it happens that amid this bewildering 
maze of movements no collision has yet been no- 

Celestiai Empires, t y 



254 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ticed among the stars or seems to threaten — what 
natural arrangements, if any, perpetuate indefi- 
nitely the mazy systems that, with their vacuum 
centres and eccentric orbits and widely dissimilar 
planes and directions of revolution, defy the con- 
ditions of stable equilibrium in the solar system — 
who can tell? We may get some light on the 
matter in particular cases, but the whole problem 
is plainly so large as to forbid its solution by any 
finite powers. 

Who can suppose that our infant science has 
done anything more than make a beginning, an 
insignificant beginning, on the great field of na- 
ture? Doubtless elements, forces, and laws far 
more numerous than those yet discovered hide 
behind various veils. As our pryings into the 
worlds just about us, and especially in new places, 
are constantly being rewarded by new discover- 
ies, we have reason to think that if we could 
transfer ourselves to distant worlds we should 
repeat this experience after a still more brilliant 
fashion, and find whole kingdoms of knowledge 
of which we have not now the slightest inkling. 
As a man with three senses ought not to pro- 
nounce it incredible that there should be five 
senses revealing attributes in nature of which he 
knows nothing, so we with our five senses ought 
not to pronounce it incredible that there should 



MYSTERIES. 255 

be beings with ten senses, each as different from 
all its fellows as sight is from taste, and revealing 
quite new departments of the creation. Did the 
stars come to an end just where the naked eye 
ended its vision, or where halted the vision of any 
one of the long apostolic succession of improving 
telescopes up to the huge Rossian ? What astron- 
omer supposes that at last w r e have seen the last 
of the stars ? And surely it is likely rather than 
otherwise that essential nature does not end just 
where our present powers of observing it happen 
to halt; likely rather than otherwise that a great 
realm of attributes, to which no man in the pres- 
ent life has the key, and whose name is therefore 
mystery, lies deep within the nature that we 
know. 

What a world of exquisite contrivances and 
uses; what prodigal riches, beauties, and gran- 
deurs; what earnest and delighted study of these 
things, and sacred pilgrimages from world to world 
by radiant intelligences for the purpose of such 
study, are in all probability, hidden away from 
us beyond yonder blue depths ! As we are con- 
tinually finding new uses in terrestrial objects, 
even in many which at first seemed most forbid- 
ding, and have been doing so for a long time, we 
cannot doubt that a great deep of such utilities still 
remains to be explored just about us ! How much 



256 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

greater deeps must there be in the numberless 
other worlds, every one of which was made by 
a wise and benevolent God, and to every one of 
which our science is only a tangent ! What stores 
of bright and precious things are ever coming 
forth in driblets from the bosom of the earth; and 
who doubts that these are mere hints and prophe- 
cies of what the earth contains, and that a genu- 
ine clairvoyance through the strata away to the 
earth's heart would reveal vaster stores of silver 
and gold and gems than ever shone in dreams or 
Arabian Nights ! Among the innumerable stars, 
and their still more numerous attendant worlds, 
how much of such wealth lies in hiding — the 
stars from whose golden light sometimes comes to 
our spectroscopes the light of gold ! We can only 
speak nebulously; but we more than suspect that 
as our eyes rest on the evening firmament there 
silently enters them the sheen of inestimable 
riches. Also the sheen of landscapes without, 
whose beauty and grandeur befit worlds where 
sin has never reigned and among which come 
and go bright-winged intelligences on such pil- 
grimages from the "many mansions" of the cen- 
tral heaven as we are told have often been made 
to our world. For we cannot think that our 
small world is the only one to receive such heav- 
enly delegations, but on the contrary must be- 




ULTERIOR SYSTEMS. 



MYSTERIES. 25/ 

lieve that far and wide the celestial spaces are 
flashing with radiant forms hastening along on 
sublime voyages of discovery, and studying from 
world to world and from system to system the 
wondrous works and ways of God. Mysterious 
activities of mysterious populations among mys- 
teries of power and wisdom ! 

We have our biographies of individuals and 
nations. Geologists undertake to give us a sort 
of biography of this globe itself. But what we 
actually secure in all such cases when sure of our 
facts (which is not as often as one could wish) are 
a few of the easier and more superficial particu- 
lars that go to make up history. What is re- 
corded is as nothing to what is left unrecorded. 
Here and there a ray of light touches a hill-top, 
or we single out a star on the nearer outskirts of 
a nebula, or we pick up a stone or shell or sea- 
weed that may serve as a sample of the contents 
of that u great and wide sea in which are things 
innumerable," but whose abysses our eyes never 
penetrate. This is all our terrestrial history 
amounts to. As to the celestial history we know 
still less. If a complete history of a thing is a 
full account of all that has befallen its parts from 
the beginning, and if we cannot give a full ac- 
count of what has happened to a single atom for 
a single day, much less for what is practically an 



258 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

eternity, what a hopeless and unimaginable un- 
known to us must be the full history of a plan- 
etary system, and especially of that great system 
which embraces all nature ! We cannot put 
girdle about such a volume even in fancy. It 
exists in the mind of God, written out fully, 
down to the smallest particle of punctuation ; and 
doubtless each event, however trifling, has left 
some trace of itself in nature which an Infinite 
Being could read; but to such power as ours such 
a book of remembrance must ever be sealed with 
more than seven seals. 

Imbedded in these mysteries of history, and 
indeed a part of them, are mysteries of holiness 
and happiness, of sin and sorrow, of heaven and 
hell. We know of vast cosmical populations 
which must have been made for the sake of their 
relations to happiness and goodness; we know 
that great numbers of these are perfectly good 
and happy (but perfection in such matters is it- 
self a mystery to us), while others are correspond- 
ingly wretched and sinful. So much we know 
from Scripture. But Scripture leaves heavy veils 
still depending before the places where, the times 
when, the manner how, the proportions in which, 
the good and bad, the happy and unhappy, subsist. 
One can ask no end of questions about such mat- 
ters to which no answer comes. So much is un- 



MYSTERIES. 259 

known that, doubtless, when we " fly away " from 
earth it will be to surprising revelations, and yet 
such revelations as will never exhaust the dark- 
ness on which they prey. It will always be like 
some far-off stellar nebula which opens more and 
more under successive improvements of the tele- 
scope, but which always retains a background of 
the unresolved. 

The material universe is often called the book 
of nature. It is not only a book, but a history. 
It contains within its mighty lids an exact ac- 
count of every event that has ever taken place 
from that remote time when, at the creative word, 
worlds began to be, down to the latest present. 
Nay, more, it contains, and will always contain, 
innumerable copies of each such event. There 
is no danger that the universe will not always 
retain ample materials for reconstructing a com- 
plete fac-simile of its whole past. 

Of course every event in the history of this or 
any other world on which light rests sends off 
into space in all directions rays which only need 
to be focused by an eye in order to make visible 
pictures of itself. These rays will never cease to 
travel (such is the general astronomic thought), 
so that there will always be somewhere in the 
universe endless latent photographs of the event. 
Thus the scene of the terrestrial creation, bathed 



260 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

in the new light, at once sent off copies of itself 
towards all points of the compass, copies which 
have been flying ever since and are now on the 
outskirts of that great historic sphere which has 
no absolute outskirts ; and an eye there gathering 
in the flying rays would, if sufficiently sensitive, 
see the scene as a present reality. After the lapse 
of ages w r ould arrive at the same point on the 
wings of light the picture of a new geologic 
epoch ; after still other ages the picture of Eden 
and our first parents; after still other ages the 
picture of Jesus on the cross ; and between these 
would be constantly arriving intermediate scenes 
both great and small, each at its proper interval 
of time. If the observer should tire of waiting 
for great epochal events, say the atonement, for 
the sight of which the old saints so hungered and 
thirsted, he would only need to travel towards 
the earth in order to shorten the interval ; and if 
he could flash in a moment through the whole 
mighty interval to the earth he would succes- 
sively meet and accumulate into a moment im- 
ages of all the light-touched events on the globe 
since its creation. Also, if he should wish to 
continue his examination of any particular event, 
he could do so by accompanying the light that 
reveals it at equal pace ; or if he should wish to 
protract the interval between the arrival of any 



MYSTERIES. 261 

two events, lie could do so to any extent by- 
moving with the proper velocity in the same di- 
rection. Thus, in the infinite sphere of space that 
surrounds the earth the nearer regions are occu- 
pied by the light that contains potentially the 
story of the most recent events, the most remote 
regions by that w r hich contains the story of the 
most remote events, and all the intermediate spa- 
ces by pictures potential of all intermediate events 
chronologically arranged. And the time will nev- 
er come when these latent photographs will not 
be winging their way somewhere in the universe 
in just the same position relative to one another 
in space as are the events themselves in time. 
Every visible thing, down to the smallest, is 
there, and everything in just the order and inter- 
val of its sequence, and as many exact copies of 
the series as there are radii of the great sphere, 
less by one. Like the successive chapters of his- 
tory, like the historic slabs of Babylonia laid up 
in the temple of Belus in due order, here are the 
annals of all time done into pictures; nothing 
neglected, however small, nothing omitted be- 
cause too large, neither suppression nor misrep- 
resentation of the facts; in short, the Bible of 
history without note or comment, for ever beyond 
the reach of tampering hands, a permanent the- 
saurus and book of reference as to all facts that 



26a CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

have shone in the light of sun or star or other 
luminary. 

These views are not new. But are there not 
many events which occur in the darkness, espe- 
cially such as cannot bear the light? Are there 
not still others which shine, but whose rays are 
speedily intercepted on all sides by impervious 
media, as by the walls of windowless dungeons 
or encompassing strata of the earth? Also, are 
there not spirits and spiritual things, such as 
thoughts, feelings, purposes, character, which 
never directly reveal themselves by light, and 
from the nature of the case cannot? Will not all 
such things fail to get registered in nature's great 
house of records and universal archives ? It may 
well be questioned whether there is any spiritual 
thing that does not so pulse on the materialism 
that closely hugs it on every side as to leave on it 
some characteristic impression of itself, as it may 
be questioned whether any event in the world of 
matter ever takes place in absolute darkness, or 
has its outward-going rays totally cut off by per- 
fectly opaque substances. But, granting that 
such rayless events do occur in the world of mat- 
ter, it seems plain that they must yet so record 
themselves in all directions in space by charac- 
teristic micrographs that they can well be under- 
stood from them by at least a divine mind. From 



MYSTERIES. 263 

the nature of the case they must all be faithful 
expressions of the source from which they come; 
like fresh coins, they must all bear a picture of 
the sovereign from whom they issue. No atom 
can change its position without affecting in some 
way its neighbor. And this amounts to saying 
that every such change has an endless series of 
consequences in both space and time. So there 
is everywhere a state of things somewhat differ- 
ent from what there would have been if that 
change had not occurred, and so a state of things 
from which the proper powers could infer the 
event which has impressed itself upon it. From 
the law of gravity it follows that no particle can 
undergo any change of place without somewhat 
altering its attraction on every other particle, 
always in degree and almost always in direction. 
But the attraction of gravitation is not the only 
means which a particle has for influencing other 
particles. It may act chemically on its imme- 
diate neighbors, and this action alters their rela- 
tions somewhat both chemically and mechani- 
cally to their immediate neighbors, and so wave- 
lets of influence and results go out indefinitely in 
every direction. At whatever point a wavelet is 
found it carries wrapped up in itself all the pecu- 
liarities, both essential and circumstantial, of the 
original cause, and the proper analytical powers 



264 CEUSSTIAI, EMPIRES. 

could interpret the cause from the result with per- 
fect accuracy and completeness, just as our feebler 
analysis can resolve a given planetary motion into 
the various individual motions that compose it, 
and refer each one to its own cause — this to the 
moon, that to Venus, another to Mars. Thus 
every event that occurs is itself a cause, casting 
off in every direction an infinite number of auto- 
graphs, as it were, which, if studied under suffi- 
cient magnifiers, can be made to surrender every 
feature of the cause, however minute. As every 
man's handwriting has its peculiarity by which 
an expert can identify him; as every man's hand- 
writing at a given time contains the whole story 
of those physical and spiritual conditions whose 
resultant at the time guided his pen, though the 
deciphering is too much for us, so every event is 
really a chirography in whose mazy strokes is ac- 
curately registered a full account of all the influ- 
ences which have made it what it is. 

Certainly the ongoings of all Nature for a sin- 
gle moment would overwhelm with their count- 
less items the memory and comprehension of the 
most gifted scholar. How much more these on- 
goings from the beginning till now ! How much 
more still the infinite records of these endless 
movements indelibly written in scientific cipher 
on all the broad face and profound heart of the 



MYSTERIES. 265 

creation — the lines crossed and recrossed, im- 
posed and superimposed, woven and interwoven 
beyond all the interpreting powers of man for a 
single solid sentence of the mighty scripture, 
though we are able to make out here and there a 
letter and perchance a word which we call science. 
In the alcoves of this immense librarium, this in- 
terstellar Alexandrian that will never suffer arson, 
we linger and wonder, we glance along its mighty 
corridors to where the vista ends in a star; we 
gaze up its dizzy altitudes and stages where tomes 
rise o'er tomes, archives o'er archives without 
end. August Bibliotheca, hieroglyph, chrono- 
graph, mystery! Will it ever cease to be such? 
When will you find a surer or a greater ? 

I have said that such an unsparing record as 
natural laws tend to make of all events is beyond 
the present deciphering of any man. Even the 
record of his own single life is beyond it; and is 
likely to be beyond any of his future powers, des- 
tined to endless expansion as they are. Nay, it 
is likely that it would not be desirable for a good 
man to read such a full record of his past if he 
could ever become capable of it — not desirable, 
say, for the thief becoming penitent on the cross 
to be obliged to face always and wherever he 
goes every mortifying particular of his guilt and 
shame, to find all nature indelibly scribbled over 



266 CEWSSTIAI, EMPIRES. 

with the shameful story. " Oh, for some Lethe 
to roll oblivion over the scene! Oh, that Nature 
would be merciful and reverse her awful stylus 
on the too faithful page!" But Nature has no 
mercy. He must look to the Supernatural for 
that. God can both erase and prevent the gloomy 
inscriptions he so much dreads to meet; and it is 
to be hoped and believed that the All-Power- 
ful will do as much for every penitent sinner. 
" Blessed is the man whose iniquity is covered." 
Nature would be a great terror to us all, apart 
from a merciful God. It is a comfort to us to 
believe that there is a Force regnant among the 
unpitying natural forces which is able in the 
widest sense to ( ( blot out our transgressions. ' ' 

And this brings us face to face with the great- 
est of all mysteries. 

Yes, the celestial spaces contain a greater 
mystery than any we have yet mentioned, viz., 
GOD. ( ' This world embarrasses me, ' ' said Vol- 
taire: "I cannot imagine how this clock exists, 
and not a clock-maker. ' ' Much more embarras- 
sing is the great clock of all the heavens. It 
strikes the knell of atheism. Somewhere out in 
yonder sublime materialism in the midst of a still 
sublimer created spiritual realm for the sake of 
which the material was made, dwells a PERSON 
to whom belong the unfathomable mysteries of 



MYSTERIES. 267 

self-existence, trinity in unity, creative force, 
omnipotence and omniscience, and whose sceptre 
touches every atom and event in the universe. 
That such a Being is, we can understand, but who 
can understand such a Being? I lift up my hand 
to the glowing firmament, and challenge answer 
from every star. l ' Canst thou by searching find 
out God?" Is there no voice in all the populous 
heavens to cry back, "Yes"? And a voice does 
come to me: I cover my face as I listen. " Yes, 
I know Him. I have computed his eternity, I 
have sounded his knowledge and power, I have 
measured his goodness, I have bounded all his 
faculties north, south, east, and w r est, I have 
taken the altitude of his throne. Yes, I know 
him altogether. ' ' That voice thrills me through 
and through. Yes, Lord it is even so. There is 
One that can say even as much as this — it is 
Thyself. But every creature, from brute to su- 
preme archangel, is either dumb or says, "Touch- 
ing the Almighty, w r e cannot find him out. His 
greatness is unsearchable." Back of all those 
bright-eyed myriads there is not a single finite in- 
telligence whose still brighter eyes can find out 
the Almighty to perfection, or even do more than 
blink at the darling photosphere of this Mystery 
of mysteries. 



XVIII. MISCELLANIES. 



1. WONDERFUL FACTS. 

2. NOT SUCH TO SOME. 

3. HOW TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

4. " PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE. " 

5. THE ELECTRIC CIRCUIT. 

6. FURTHER DISCOVERIES. 

7. HELPFUL TO RELIGION. 

8. NOT FAITH-COMPELLING. 

9. A SCIENTIFIC MILLENNIUM. 



MISCELLANIES. 271 



XVIII. MISCELLANIES. 

1. IT is not easy, and certainly it is not desi- 
rable, to wholly avoid speculation in setting forth 
the main astronomical facts. Every great fact 
carries with itself a group of other facts, as a sun 
does a group of planets. These satellite-truths 
may none of them appear so clearly as the pri- 
mary; and some may be little more than guesses, 
and yet demand a sort of recognition from us as 
being on a level, in point of probability and au- 
thority, with the ordinary informations that must 
largely guide our lives. But they ought to be 
stated for what they are, and not for what they 
are not; they ought not to be set down as demon- 
strated science, or anything like it, but as being 
more or less probable inferences or suggestions of 
science. If any inference is merely conjectural, 
let it be so stated. If he suspects that the axis of 
the earth is changing, or that its rotation-period is 
lengthening, or that space is a plenum, or that 
among the estimates of famous men as to the heat 
of the sun, varying from 1,669 degrees Fahrenheit 
to more than 5,000,000 degrees, the largest esti- 
mate of Secchi is right, or that the solar heat is 
maintained by the fall of meteorites, or that the 



2/2 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

sun will become an iceberg in 10,000,000 of years, 
or that it will gradually suck all the members of 
its system into itself and universal bonfire, or that 
life was introduced into this world by meteorites 
from other worlds, e3pecially if he suspects that 
the doctrine of gravity is at fault in the lunar 
theory, let it be frankly stated as a mere suspi- 
cion. "He that hath a dream, let him tell it as a 
dream." Let him be careful not to tell it as sci- 
ence, or even as what will sooner or later turn out 
to be science. This law is often sinned against, 
notably in the case of the nebular hypothesis. It 
is an hypothesis, but one that is often represented 
by its friends as scientifically proven. That it 
has some plausibilities, that it harmonizes with 
some observed facts, may properly be claimed: 
but this is nothing more than may be claimed for 
many known fictions. There are many per contras 
to be taken into account, especially among the 
stellar systems; it is only when such things are 
defied or neglected that the nebular part, or any 
other part, of the evolution scheme appears ' c as 
well established as the Copernican theory." Has 
Virchow no warrant at all for saying that c ' evo- 
lution has no scientific basis"? Are Secchi and 
Pasteur and Beale and Lotze and Max Muller 
some three centuries behind the age in agreeing 
with him ? Can we afford to put Agassis out of 



MISCELLANIES. 2/3 

the realm of science because he wrote: "The 
thing is a scientific blunder, untrue in its facts, 
unscientific in its method, and ruinous in its ten- 
dency"? Must we invite such men as Alexander 
Humboldt and Sir John Herschel and Hugh Mil- 
ler and Sir David Brewster to step down and out 
from their place as conscript fathers and amphic- 
tyons of science because they did not accept the 
development hypothesis as being science? It is 
true that some of these men are not now living; 
but it is not long since they left us, and they were 
possessed of all the main facts on the subject now 
known. If the status of the question has altered 
at all since their day it has been to the discredit 
of evolution. 

But the chief astronomical teachings are not 
speculations. Mathematics and observation, made 
potential by superb instruments, have with vast 
labor dug them out of the infinite quarry of un- 
known fact. Yet they might easily pass for fic- 
tions with the uninstructed because of their very 
hugeness and splendor in which they transcend 
even Oriental fiction. For a time some of them, 
in the earlier stages of wrestling inquiry, seemed 
even to scholars hardly more than fictions founded 
on fact, as we complacently style some of our his- 
tories. But great as is the main astronomical 
story, even to mystery, it is simple, sober, unex- 



274 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

aggerated, proven truth, far beyond most other 
sciences. Those great numbers, distances, sizes, 
systems, motions, orbits, periods, forces, perturba- 
tions, however staggering and dazzling the figures 
and thoughts they suggest, are no poetical hyper- 
boles for which apology needs to be made to com- 
mon sense, and which we blush to air in the pres- 
ence of calm-eyed science. 

Our main astronomical facts have sometimes 
come to us singly; with long intervals between 
has star after star fallen to the earth. Then 
suddenly the sky has blazed showers of meteors 
with their long trails of glory. Such w r ere the 
times of Kepler and Galileo and Newton. " And 
the stars rain their fire and the beautiful sing." 
But whether singly, as if wrested painfully out 
of the hands of reluctant nature, or in an out- 
burst of starry groups and constellations, as if, 
casting stint and measure aside, she had become 
a largess-giving queen, they are illustrious dis- 
coveries appealing strongly to our sense of won- 
der. 

2. Still they may not at first seem wonderful 
to some of us. Some of us are used to them. We 
have known them from childhood; parents have 
incidentally spoken of them; teachers and text- 
books have formally explained and inculcated; 
an occasional lecture or book has kept fresh the 



MISCELLANIES. 275 

school lessons; and the effect has been to blunt 
the edge of wonder. Whoever has seen the even- 
ing sky, beautiful and glorious as it is, every 
evening for 70 years is apt to see it without a rip- 
ple of emotion of any sort; it has very likely no 
more effect on him than does the roof of a barn 
enlivened with fireflies. So after a little the 
abundant Mosaic and Christian miracles lost 
much of their power to impress ; men who at first 
trembled with awe soon learned to look on them 
with steady nerves and flinty hearts; and if they 
were matters of daily observation for a lifetime, 
they came to be but as the daily rising of the sun. 
Even so, it may be, familiarity with the astro- 
nomic marvels may have dulled in some of my 
readers the natural sense of their exceeding great- 
ness, so that when fairly marshalled before them 
they do not dilate the eyes one bit or send a sin- 
gle thrill, not even as much as comes when the 
country militia pass in review with tramp and 
banner. 

3. But what would be the astonishment of any 
of us if we could be suddenly brought for t\ie first 
time face to face with the heavens as science now 
sees them ? The pretelescopic men of more than 
300 years ago were like Aristotle's subterranean 
men in regard to our astronomy; and though fur- 
.nished with the largest faculties and used to the 



276 CELESTIAI, EMPIRES. 

grandest thoughts, would have been amazed per- 
haps to dumbness could they have been suddenly 
set on the lofty eminence from which we look 
forth so commandingly into the sky. They had 
not dreamed of such splendid sights, such mag- 
nificent scenery, such marshalled hosts of the 
beautiful and grand. They could not have ima- 
gined to themselves such geometrical precision of 
measurements, such unveiling of celestial land- 
scapes, such stupendous numbers, distances, sizes, 
motions, forces, systems, populations. If on some 
morning the Nuncius Siderius of Galileo had 
come to them with its sheet expanded to many 
times its old size, and blazoned all over with the 
sober astronomy of to-day, they would have 
promptly rejected it as incredible and impossible. 
As it was, it was a hard and slow matter to credit 
even such alphabetical facts as the optic tube of 
the great Florentine actually put under their eye. 
So they persecuted him, not so much the ecclesi- 
astics of the period as his brother scientists. So 
his brother scientists at first persecuted the celes- 
tial mathematics of Newton. What are now uni- 
versally received as elementary principles, by 
which all things are tried in the courts of our 
science, had to make their way through dispute, 
obloquy, and battle with the professed friends of 
knowledge. How would they have flashed out 



MISCELLANIES. 277 

their utter unbelief and scorn had the whole bud- 
get of the marvellous astronomy that we know 
been offered to their acceptance at once ! But if 
at last convinced by overwhelming evidence that 
what had seemed stupendous fictions were simple 
facts without one iota of inflation or false color, 
they would have stood with bare brows, flushed 
cheeks, open mouths, and uplifted hands; per- 
haps would have done as some enthusiastic patri- 
ots have been known to do on the news of great 
and unexpected victories. Unexpected? Was 
not all Europe embattled against us — numbers, 
experience, veteran commanders, munitions of 
war, everything? And yet here are Montenotte 
and Millesimo and Lonato and Castiglione and 
Arcole and Rivoli and Lisonzo — all within a 
twelvemonth ! It was intoxicating. Up rose the 
shouts on the banks of the Seine, loud rang the 
bells, red glowed the bonfires, high waved the 
banners, fast and far thundered the rejoicing can- 
non. Was ever such a time ! Was ever such 
glory ! Was ever such a Napoleon Buonaparte ! 

It is said that the neighbors of Friar Bacon 
were so wonder-smitten at the scientific feats he 
performed that he was forced to conceal many of 
his discoveries and marvels lest the people should 
think him in league with the devil. Much more 
would this prudent reticence have been forced 



278 CEI«ESTIAI« EMPIRES. 

upon him if he had found himself charged with 
such stores of startling novelties as are no longer 
novelties to astronomers. 

4. "Put yourself in his place." We should 
try to put ourselves in the place of those ancient 
men and see our astronomy as through their eyes. 
Is this possible? See how absorbed they are in 
the acting or the story. You speak to them, they 
do not hear; you appeal to their eyes, they do not 
see. The fact is they are far away, buried amid 
the old centuries or the old countries, wrapped up 
in the scenes and fortunes, the doings and expe- 
riences, of other people. For the present they are 
leading the lives of others, thinking what they 
think, feeling what they feel, struggling in their 
struggles. For the time being the cobbler is a 
king, the poor man rich, the coward a hero, the 
child a man. Instead of its being an unusual 
thing for one to be able to put himself in the 
place of another and, as it were, look at things 
through another's eyes, it is as common as it is 
for one to have a faculty for getting interested in 
a story. 

This faculty, so commonly possessed, let us 
put into exercise, and look at our great astronom- 
ical facts as some neophyte among the stars would 
look at them, or as would the men of the four- 
teenth century. Ah, how the skies brighten, 



MISCELLANIES. 279 

expand, multiply, sweep away into beautiful and 
glorious infinity on all hands ! Adieu, Seven 
Wonders of the world ! Adieu, Munchausen and 
the Arabian Nights! Your wonders are tameness 
itself. We, lovers of the marvellous, pass them 
all by in favor of this stupendous astronomy be- 
fore whose startling greatness all mere fable 
stands abashed, though it deals with magic and 
fairies and genii and even Jupiters. 

5. Does anything stand absolutely alone ? Do 
not all the arts and sciences touch one another, 
sympathize with one another ? Are they not all 
linked together in many subtile forms of interde- 
pendence, somewhat as are the different members 
of the same body to make one organic whole? In 
feeding one we feed all; in lifting one we lift all; 
so we w r ould naturally suppose that such great 
astronomical discoveries must have greatly stim- 
ulated every other department of knowledge. In 
point of fact they were so many thunder-claps and 
fire-bells. They said to sleeping minds every- 
where, " Awake! See what can be done. If 
the barriers of nature can be broken through 
here, why not elsewhere?" So the students of 
nature were encouraged to launch boldly forth on 
voyages of discovery. As the success of Colum- 
bus set in motion the exploring fleets of half the 
world, so the successes of the Newtons and Her- 



28o CELESTIAI, EMPIRES. 

schels started up scientific adventurers on all 
hands and sent them forth to knock at a hundred 
gates of the unknown. Not a department of na- 
ture but got a louder summons to surrender; not 
a science but became emulous of its stirring sis- 
ter, felt the inspiration of her great example. 
Indeed, astronomy has acted as midwife at the 
birth of most modern sciences. Some of them, 
as optics, the calculus, the science of probabili- 
ties, and other mathematical sciences, are hardly 
less than her own children. They began to be 
and have grown largely through the effort to 
solve celestial problems. Also, the effort to im- 
prove the telescope, and to make and improve 
other astronomical instruments (for example, 
those used for making exact measurements of the 
meridian, as well as of stellar intervals), has led 
to great improvements in the mechanic arts and 
in those mingled sciences and arts which wait 
so efficiently on our civilization. Photography, 
chronometry, microscopy, and most of the arts 
and sciences of observation have largely gained 
their skill by acting as handmaids to her and rev- 
erently carrying her queenly train. Sometimes 
they have only stood by holding by her skirts. 
Especially is this true of navigation, on which 
commerce and all the arts which trade nourishes 
so thoroughly depend. So astronomy, the most 



MISCELLANIES. 28l 

ancient and perfect of sciences, has made or oxy- 
genated the blood away to the very tips of the 
fingers of that body which we call society. It 
has sent thrill and verve into all thought and 
into all forms of labor. In fact, all the arts and 
sciences hold one another by the hand, and the 
electricity that makes one leap thrills through the 
whole circuit. 

6. Has the last word been spoken? Has as- 
tronomy gone the length of her tether? Has she 
exhausted her material? or, if that is not possi- 
ble, has she come to barriers insurmountable by 
human faculties, and always saying, l ' I forbid 
thee"? At the point where we now stand must 
we fold our arms and say there is nothing further 
to be hoped for in this direction ? The Lord wills 
it ; henceforth we are destined to be only consu- 
mers of celestial knowledge, never producers ; to 
be heirs of the past, never bequeathers to the fu- 
ture." 

History is against it. c ( If, simply referring to 
the progress of science in our own times, we com- 
pare the imperfect physical knowledge of Robert 
Boyle, Gilbert, and Hales with that of the present 
day, and remember that every few years are char- 
acterized by an increasing rapidity of advance, 
we shall be better able to imagine the periodical 
and endless changes which all physical sciences 



282 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

are destined to undergo. What has been already 
perceived by no means exhausts that which is 
perceptible. New substances and new forces will 
be discovered. ' } 

These views of Humboldt will be accepted as 
foreshadowing the future of astronomy. 

It was not so very long ago when it was felt 
in some quarters that about all that could reason- 
ably be expected in the way of unearthing valu- 
able works of ancient men had been done. " Are 
not the museums of Europe already full of ex- 
humed statues, vases, arms, utensils ? There is 
an end to such things, and we have about reached 
it. ' ' When lo, the Roman Catacombs with their 
900 miles of Christian antiquities; Pompeii with 
its vivid pictures of early Caesarian Italy; Nine- 
veh creeping out of the mounds of Mosul into the 
British Museum ; Mycenae and Troy long doubted 
but at last appearing above ground to confound 
the doubters; the giant cities of Bashan; the re- 
mains of the Aztec civilization on this continent 
— never were richer contributions to archaeology 
than have been made within a few years. And 
now we are almost disposed to believe that under 
the Red Sea, or high among the snows of Ararat, 
or deep within the mounds of Zoan, or under the 
prehistoric sites of Etruria and Latium and Hel- 
las, as well as in the still unbroken depths of this 



MISCELLANIES. 283 

western continent, lie buried archaic treasures 
equal if not superior to any yet discovered. We 
shall go on digging and collecting. We shall 
still find the long-buried works and civilisations 
of primitive peoples, just as we are now finding 
scattered through all the leading languages frag- 
ments of the one speech with which our race be- 
gan, and just as we shall continue to find fossils 
of geologic ages long anterior to man. At last 
perhaps we shall have what will be to our pres- 
ent knowledge of the far geological past what 
the circumstantial history of a nation is to a bare 
list of its sovereigns. 

So notwithstanding the vast and brilliant stores 
of astronomical knowledge already in our posses- 
sion, we are not to suppose our mine exhausted, 
or that we have exhausted our means of working 
it. Antiquarians draw from a limited storehouse. 
Not so astronomers. Their field is absolutely in- 
exhaustible. And their exploring powers were 
never in a more encouraged and adventurous 
state than now. Their number was never so 
large. Instruments of investigation were never 
so many and dynamical. The greater the capi- 
tal the more rapid the accumulation. Somehow 
victories pave the way for victories. We con- 
quer because we are in the habit of conquering. 
Wait a little and you will find the outposts of our 



284 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

astronomy far advanced. There will, of course, 
be intervals of rest. Interregnums will occur. 
After a bountiful harvest will come a non-pro- 
ducing season, perhaps a winter; after a rainy 
season a season of no rain. But there will be 
other rains, other harvests, other summers, other 
star-showers, other reigns, world without end. 
So lift up your heads, ye young star-gazers, who 
fear that the great men of the past have left noth- 
ing for you to conquer. Broad provinces, great 
cities, mighty kingdoms of celestial truth which 
the fathers never knew, are within reach of the 
children — waiting to be conquered, wanting to 
be conquered. Bestir yourselves. Help advance 
the advancing frontiers! Stand on the shoulders 
of your predecessors, and see farther than they! 
Pile Pelion on Ossa, Uraniberg on Uraniberg, 
Switzerland on Switzerland, orb on orb, until 
the heavens are scaled and taken! If you do not 
do it, somebody else will. Some plucky adven- 
turer who never knows when he is defeated, and 
who has been brought up on the homely maxim 
that, " There are as good fish in the sea as ever 
were caught," will carry off the prizes which 
your faint-heartedness thought out of your reach. 
What are these prizes? Well, I am almost 
afraid to guess in print — almost afraid to under- 
take the business of a prophet so long after the 



MISCELLANIES. 285 

completion of the canon. But if you insist 011 
the scientific uses of the imagination, and on 
my venturing on specifications as to our astro- 
nomical future, I will, modestly and with a slight 
quaver in my voice, proceed to the venture. 

In due time we shall have telescopes, spec- 
troscopes, and other instruments of observation in 
comparison with which our present best are but 
children's toys — perhaps instruments of quite a 
different sort and as far transcending these as 
these do the rude instruments of Tycho Brahe or 
Hipparchus. Then the physical condition of the 
planets of our system, instead of being inferred 
distantly from various circumstances, will be- 
come a matter of direct observation. New moons 
will make their appearance. One new planet, 
at least, will be conclusively found glowing be- 
tween Mercury and the sun ; and its name will be 
Vulcan. A new planet will be found darkling 
and seemingly freezing beyond the orbit of Nep- 
tune; and its name, despite its coldness, will be 
Pluto. I scorn to say that many a new asteroid 
will be found between Mars and Jupiter; this 
goes without saying, is what everybody knows. 
What everybody does not know is that our new 
magnifiers, which will have found out a way to 
enlarge the image of a heavenly body without 
diminishing its brightness, will show us on plan- 

19 



286 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ets of our system cities, temples, palaces, and 
other large works of the people inhabiting them; 
nay, perhaps the very people themselves. Did 
not Sir David Brewster say, " When we compare 
the telescope in Newton's time with that of Sir 
William Herschel we need scarcely despair of 
discovering the structures erected by the inhabi- 
tants of the moon"? So the books (mine among 
the rest) will cease to argue the plurality of 
worlds. Some new scope, which we may as well 
name dynamiscope, will show us the elementary 
constitution of the cold planets as the spectro- 
scope now shows that of incandescent suns, and 
will detect and interpret modifications made in 
reflected light by the nature of the soil, as well 
as by that of the atmosphere from which it last 
comes to us. The theory of the sun, of the 
comets, of an interplanetary ether now so dis- 
puted and disputable in some points, will clear 
up; and the guesses of our present text-books ex- 
change their subjunctives for the indicatives of 
positive knowledge. The Calculus of Newton 
and Laplace will be greatly reinforced, perhaps an 
analysis altogether new w T ill be thought out, one 
as much more powerful than our present as that 
is more powerful than the geometry of Euclid 
or common arithmetic. And then the problem 
of the stability of the solar system under the new 



MISCELLANIES. 2S7 

conditions and disturbances which L,agrange did 
not consider will get new solution, and it w r ill 
appear that there are other guarantees of perma- 
nent equilibrium than those we now know of. 
And perhaps that present despair of physical as- 
tronomy, via;., the problem of the three bodies, 
will find its master in the new Calculus. 

We find that there is a mysterious sympathy 
between the spots on the sun and magnetic phe- 
nomena on the earth. This mystery will be cleared 
up, and other ties of interdependence between the 
members of the solar family will be brought to 
light. And it may be (this is said in a whisper 
and with half-shut eyes) that on the currents of 
energy that come and go between the planets ac- 
cording to fixed laws, like the trade currents in 
our atmosphere and oceans between different 
countries, we may be able to send, if not articu- 
late speech, at least some other symbol of thought 
to our planetary neighbors, and finally come to 
establish an intelligent communication w T ith them 
that owes nothing to spiritualism. 

But will the solar system engross all the new 
discoveries ? Will not a fresh bridge be thrown 
by our astronomical engineers across the void be- 
tween us and the fixed stars ? I think I see it — 
think I see it in those mightier mathematics and 
observing instruments just on the brink of con- 



288 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

struction. Science will go out over the vast and 
unquavering arches and will find new suns and 
a plenty of them. It will measure among them 
new distances and si^es with unheard-of accuracy. 
It will detect new motions, orbits, systems. Such 
additional evidence of the unseen stellar planets 
that we all believe in will be found in the pertur- 
bations of the stellar motions as will transform 
our faith to sight; nay, our wonder-telescope will 
catch actual sight of not a few of those satellite 
planets which have so long hid themselves in 
distance and in the effulgence of their prima- 
ries. Many of those primaries will take on sen- 
sible diameters as no one of them has yet done. 
Will not repulsive forces as well as attractive be 
discovered? At least the shining fringe of laws 
widely different from that of gravity will come 
into view. The theory of light itself will come 
to be better understood, not to say reconstructed; 
and that still mysterious thing will be found to 
contain in its varieties of quality, degree, color, 
and motion a grand addition to that alphabet of 
which the spectroscope has already furnished us a 
few letters — a larger Rosetta Stone by which we 
can interpret the stars as to their elements, states, 
motions, directions, and perhaps age, as we are 
yet far from being able to do. 

And then the nebulae. As our telescopes have 



MISCELLANIES. 289 

improved, many of these objects that were said 
by experts to have the " characteristics of irre- 
solvability strongly marked," have been resolved 
into stars. This process, I suspect, will go on, 
and, as has been the case in the past, even neb- 
ulae giving the gaseous spectrum will be individ- 
ualized into stars — wholly gaseous it may be, 
though not necessarily so — until at last the no- 
tion that any of the nebulae are continuous fire- 
mists, such as the atheists demand for the natural 
production of celestial systems, will quietly drop 
out of our astronomy. There will be no repent- 
ance, little or no confession of mistake. That 
would be beneath the dignity of current science, 
that never forgets to be infallible. The task of 
confession will be left to the frankness and humil- 
ity of a later generation. It is far easier to con- 
fess by proxy than in person — to confess the mis- 
takes of our ancestors than our own. So the 
great nebular mistake, like the Ptolemaic and 
many another, will by degrees be quietly ignored, 
and at last disappear from text-book and speech, 
till the time comes for its appearance in astronom- 
ical history as an illustration of Humboldt's say- 
ing, "All works treating of empirical knowledge 
and of the connection of natural laws and physi- 
cal phenomena are subject to the most marked 
modifications in the lapse of short periods of time; 



290 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

and those scientific works which have, to use a 
common expression, become antiqttated by the 
acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus 
continually being consigned to oblivion as un- 
readable. ' ' 

Has not photography some triumphs in store 
on the whole astronomic field — on the moon, on 
the planets, on sporadic stars, on the nebulae? 
We shall make cumulative pictures of celestial 
objects; we shall illuminate these pictures won- 
derfully with electric light or with some vril as 
much more powerful than electricity as dynamite 
is more powerful than common powder, and then 
we will bring to bear upon them wonderful mag- 
nifiers that will bring out to view the minims of 
the photo. These are the minims of the objects 
pictured. For light is not like other artists, con- 
tenting itself with general resemblance and the 
larger features of an object, but paints into her 
pictures everything, the whole sum of details down 
to the last jot with inconceivable fidelity and del- 
icacy of pencil. Brought to bear on such all- 
comprehending pictures, our future miscroscopes 
will be able to descry moons, planets, suns far too 
minute for direct vision — will be able to discover 
objects on them, as forests, rivers, buildings, ani- 
mals, manlike beings, and even smaller things. 
We can accumulate the impressions which light 



MISCELLANIES. 291 

makes. The photograph plate which refuses to 
give instantaneous picture will, if subjected to the 
action of light for a considerable time, give a 
strong one. The color of vegetables and men 
may be greatly changed by long exposure to the 
sun when a brief one produces no sensible effect. 
That is, there is a heaping up of effects individu- 
ally insignificant till their sum becomes apprecia- 
ble and even impressive. Can we not accumu- 
late light itself as well as the impressions it 
makes ? As it has been found possible to collect 
and store away electricity so as to secure almost 
any amount of it for electric work, so it seems 
possible to collect and store away the light that 
comes from any object, say a star, till we have it 
in sufficient measure to make a great impression 
on the eye, the telescope, the photometer, the 
spectroscope, the photographic plate; so that a 
star of the sixteenth magnitude may be examined 
as one of the first, and one of the first magnitude 
as a sun. This plainly would open the door for 
many discoveries. Light has still about it many 
mysteries awaiting solution, and some of them 
seem waiting very impatiently. Their knocking 
at our doors seems almost a threat of breaking 
through unless we open speedily. 

7. Whatever may be thought of these sugges- 
tions (please notice that I do not call them theories 



292 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

u as well established as the Copernican"), there 
can be no question but that astronomy is still 
coming, and coming brilliantly. So great a past 
argues a great future. And, for one, I anticipate 
thart the discoveries of the future, like those of 
the past, will, when orice fairly understood in all 
their bearings, help the doctrine of the supernat- 
ural and revealed religion. Each will be a new 
step added to that golden flight of steps by which 
rational thought climbs to better views of God 
and of the duty we owe to him. More and more 
the stars will be signal fires by which heaven 
communicates with earth — the beacons to warn 
men off the rocks of atheism, both theoretical and 
practical; the mathematics of Laplace to prove, 
with a broader and wiser interest than his, that 
the probability that the planetary motions origi- 
nated in a common cause is two million times 
greater than that the sun will rise to-morrow. 

The first crude impressions of a new science, 
or of a new chapter of a science, are apt to be 
misleading. "A little learning is a dangerous 
thing." This half-truth has had no small show 
of support in the history of knowledge. Infant 
geology and archaeology seemed to fight against 
the Bible. So did the infant astronomy of more 
than three centuries ago. And every now and 
then some new find in the heavens has been 



MISCELLANIES. 293 

caught at by the atheist as giving new counte- 
nance to the notion that blind force and law, in- 
stead of a personal Being, is the true maker and 
monarch of nature. We are not yet out of the 
woods of this sort of foolishness and abomination. 
The very vastness of the universe is still too often 
interposed as a shield between us and God, made 
to conceal his person, hide our responsibility, and 
protect agnosticism. But such abuses of science 
are most common in its earlier stages, while it is 
yet strange and nebulous to the thought. As it 
becomes familiar, and its surroundings and rela- 
tions clear up, it is very apt to face about and 
become a witness and champion for God and re- 
ligion. So runs our experience. We have found 
that all ways lead to Rome. 

Such will continue to be our finding. Very 
likely some of the new celestial facts that are 
knocking at our doors will at first be taken by 
some as making against God and Christianity. 
But u time will bring its revenges." Fuller 
knowledge will discover a friend in^the enemy, 
a defender in the assailant. Competent men will 
start up to brush away misunderstandings and 
perversions, to set the truth in a just light, to 
translate its strangeness into the language of re- 
ligion and, perhaps, into the very gospel of Christ. 
It must be so. More astronomical discoveries 



294 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

must mean more light on the existence, power, 
and wisdom of God, on the magnificence of his 
empire, and on the impossibility that such an 
empire as this has been formed or maintained by- 
mere unthinking natural force and law. It must 
be that the better we understand the book of na- 
ture the plainer will appear the concord between 
it and that other divine Book which we call the 
Bible. 

Some ancients thought and said that the stars 
make music as they roll. And so they do. 

" In reason's ear they all rejoice 
And utter forth a glorious voice, 
For ever singing as they shine, 
The hand that made us is divine." 

There is such a thing as the " music of the 
spheres, " beautiful chords and concords, beauti- 
ful harmonies fit for the angels to listen to; I had 
almost said beautiful enough, when fairly drunk 
in, to do what old Timotheus and divine Cecilia 
are said to have done: 

" He raised a mortal to the skies, she drew an angel down.' 1 

I speak not chiefly of their harmonies with one 
another which are so evident and remarkable, 
and in virtue of which they thread their way 
among one another in ten thousand complicate 
movements from age to age without collision; 
but rather of those higher harmonies which ob- 



MISCELLANIES. 295 

tain between them and the doctrines and spirit 
of religion. In my view what has been found 
out respecting the stars accords exquisitely with 
the idea of a creative, superintending, and infi- 
nite personal God. It shows in him such a mag- 
nificence of empire and of faculty as is in most 
eloquent and tuneful agreement with what one 
would expect, with what the soul of man craves 
and needs, and with what the Bible teaches. 
Nay, from the nature of the case, all genuine 
science must sympathize with, take part with, 
sing with genuine religion. If religion is divine, 
and nature is divinely constructed and superin- 
tended, it follows, not only that they can never 
contradict each other, but even that they must 
be mutually helpful. And what is science but a 
faithful transcript of nature? So every science 
and every sound addition to science, in its gen- 
eral influence and final result, tends to play into 
the hands of religion. The two friends under- 
take to introduce and vouch for each other. God 
explains nature and nature explains God. Key 
and lock, they suggest and require each other. 
Science is the natural food and atmosphere of 
devotion. All appearances to the contrary not- 
withstanding, it goes to nourish our moral na- 
tures, to tone and brace them up as by mountain 
airs, to set them by many a breeze and current 



296 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

towards harmony with all the laws of God, nat- 
ural and revealed. That it does not always do 
this is plain. That it ought always to do it is 
at least equally plain. Unhealthy natures may 
refuse to be nourished, and even be sickened 
still more, by the best food. Determined oarsmen 
can manage to go against wind and current. 
Diseased ears may interpret the choicest music 
into discord. So it happens that some scientists 
make science the handmaid of atheism. And 
yet it is true that all the sciences and arts (for 
the arts are as much a transcript of nature as 
the sciences themselves) are the natural allies of 
theism and religion, and even will prove them- 
selves in the end what the Jesuits profess them- 
selves to be, viz., the militia of Jesus Christ. 

On this point Agassi^ has claims to be heard — 
Agassis, who once said to a friend, U I will frank- 
ly tell you that my experience in prolonged scien- 
tific investigations convinces me that a belief in 
God — a God who is behind and within all the 
vanishing points of human knowledge — adds a 
wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to 
penetrate into the regions of the unknown. Of 
myself I may say that I never make the prepara- 
tions for penetrating into some small province of 
nature hitherto undiscovered without breathing 
a prayer to the Being who hides his secrets from 



MISCELLANIES. 297 

me only to allure me graciously on to the unfold- 
ing of them." 

So spake the sage. But 

" There is a sort of men whose faith is all 

In their five fingers and what fingering brings, 

With all beyond of wondrous great and small 
Unnamed, uncounted in their tale of things; 

A race of blinkards who peruse the case 
And shell of life, but feel no soul behind, 

And in the marshalled world can find a place 
For all things, only not the marshalling mind. 

'T is strange, 't is sad ; and yet why blame the mole 
For channelling earth ? such earthy things are they, 
E'en let them muster forth in blank array 

Frames with no pictures, pictures with no soul. 
I, while this daedal dome o'erspans the sod, 
Will own the Builder's hand and worship God." 

If I thought science inconsistent with religion 
I should not be the friend to science that I am. 
Religion is better than the grandest secular knowl- 
edge. If I must sacrifice one, it should not be the 
greater good. I should be extremely sorry for the 
necessity of parting with either Caesar or Rome- 
an bound to turn every way to avoid it ; but if 
there is no help for it and one must be given up, 
then let Csesar go. Much as I love the man, I 
love my country more. Religion, and the foun- 
dation for it in God and the Bible, is my country, 
and must be conserved at all costs. The best in- 
terests of society, its character, happiness, and 
salvation, depend on it. This fact, indeed, shows 



298 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

that it cannot be inconsistent with real science ; 
but if we must suppose the impossible, and must 
make a choice between the knowledge of the 
schools and religion, between nature and the su- 
pernatural, between the works of God and God 
himself, between the teachings of geology or as- 
tronomy and those of the Bible, the choice is soon 
made. It is better to be good than to be scientific, 
better to be happy than to be knowing. If knowl- 
edge means wickedness, then perish knowledge. 
If error means happiness and virtue — a reformed, 
blessed, and sanctified world — then let error live. 
Truth has no value save as it helps to virtue and 
enjoyment. Suppose it to be without these is- 
sues, and you suppose it to be mere rubbish. You 
may turn your back on it without offence, for it 
is no longer Her Majesty. " If ignorance is bliss, 
5 t is folly to be wise," how much more if it is also 
virtue ! All the natural sciences, including even 
magnificent astronomy, may endow me with their 
whole capital and income to the last farthing, and 
yet leave me a beggarly wretch ; but with religion 
alone I have supreme and inalienable riches. So 
if I must elect between the two, it is foreordained 
what my choice will be. Let Hagar depart ; the 
other has the promises. But I am thankful that 
the case is such that I can keep both; keep one 
as the natural handmaid of the other, welcome 



MISCELLANIES. 299 

every promise of a brilliant to-morrow for science 
as so much promise for the future of her diviner 
sister. 

"Should science tell me that my faith in God 
Is vain, since God is not, nor any need 
Of him, then would I banish from my creed 

All science, and take lessons from the clod, 

Which, dumb and dead, like Aaron's budded rod, 
Blooms yet, by miracle, to flowery mead, 
Where plain, as in the Holy Book, I read 

God's power and goodness written on the sod. 

Not thus has science taught my grateful soul, 
By starry gleam or secret cell explored, 
Nor bid me dash my faith against a stone. 

She buoys my faith on all the tides that roll, 
And tells me if to loftier heights I soared, 
In farthest skies I should find God alone." 

8. Though I anticipate that our coming as- 
tronomy, like that of to-day, will tend to magnify 
God and favor religion, yet I do not anticipate 
anything so conclusive in its character as to com- 
pel faith in God and his Word. On the contrary, 
I am confident that however brilliant future dis- 
coveries may be, and however loudly they may 
speak of the Creator and our duty to him, their 
voice will not be loud enough to command the 
ears and enforce the faith of everybody. The past 
has taught us what the future will be. A brilliant 
series of Christian scientists, whose faith and de- 
voutness have been fed by their inquiries into 
nature — men like Newton and Cuvier and Brew- 



300 CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 

ster, the ornaments of human nature, the glory of 
science, and the children of God — illuminates the 
past. And this apostolic succession will doubt- 
less continue. But then we must expect by the 
side of it, what has always been found hitherto, 
another apostolate of quite a different pattern. 
They too will be scientists, sometimes of large 
faculty and great knowledge and widely success- 
ful research. But they will be of still greater 
unbelief. Eyes wide open on nature, but shut 
and sealed on nature's God. Diligent students 
of phenomena, but oblivious of the phenomenon 
Christ. Prompt to allow all considerations that 
make against religion, as prompt to challenge all 
considerations that make for it. Taking kindly 
and even overflowingly to all hypotheses and no- 
tions that exclude God, but exacting as Euclid 
and death against everything that includes Him. 
Swift to believe in all natural marvels, occult 
forces of matter, and even the practical omnipo- 
tence and omniscience of the eternal atom, and 
scornfully refusing even to consider evidence 
from any quarter of creation and historic mira- 
cles and special providences and an eternal Per- 
son. Of course such men will be found hereafter 
as they have been found hitherto. There is no 
conceivable wonder on the earth or in the sky 
which that sort of unbelief cannot successfully 



MISCELLANIES. 301 

defy. It could stand out against the full blaze 
of New Testament miracles as well as the unbe- 
lief of the Jews did. Not if, on some fair even- 
ing, the name of God should be found written in 
shining capitals on every world that comes into 
the field of the telescope; not if each world should 
blossom o'er all its mighty orb with golden lips 
chanting in glorious polyglot the Name that is 
above every name till the earth resounds through 
all its latitudes and longitudes — not even then 
would unbelief necessarily lose its power of stub- 
born and triumphant resistance. 

The history of astronomy shows us two omnip- 
otences — one that of God the creator, the other 
that of man in resisting evidence. We can resist 
any amount of evidence if our wills are only per- 
verse enough. This is the explanation, and the 
only explanation, which Biblical principles allow 
of the madness of "an undevout astronomer. ' ' 

Who was it said, It would do our men of 
science no harm to be soundly converted? No 
matter — it is true, whoever said it. And far more 
than this is true. Nothing else would so assure 
the future of knowledge, as well as of religion, 
as would the general regeneration of the human 
will and heart. The great thing needed is not 
greater genius nor better tools nor vaster libra- 
ries, nor more government patronage nor recon- 
20 



302 CEUESTIAI, EMPIRES. 

structed universities, so much as that great moral 
change which revolutionises the attitude of the 
soul to its Maker and disposes it to " think the 
thoughts of God after him. ' ' This will repel the 
false as well as the wicked. This will invite the 
true as well as the holy. This will give love 
of truth and upright ways of seeking it, will 
give clear eyes, just balances, and steady hands. 
So both the Pharisees and Sadducees of science 
will disappear. We shall be able to dispense 
with our bristling apologetics and " reconcilia- , 
tions," for then we shall have, what the almighti- 
ness of truth and free inquiry and the scientific 
method has never yet been able to give us, a com- 
plete deliverance from the oppositions of science, 
falsely so called. Science and religion will always 
say ay to each other in sublime reciprocity. And 
then we shall have a scientific as well as Chris- 
tian millennium, discoveries falling among us as 
star-showers of unparalleled gorgeousness, as an 
hegira of constellations, as a New Jerusalem de- 
scending out of heaven from God and pointing 
to Him with all its glittering spires and with 
every lifted white finger of its white-robed citi- 
zens. 



