Richard A. Proctor

“ So also every drop of rain or snow, every particle of liquid or of frozen water in mist or in cloud, owes its birth to the sun. The questions addressed of old to Job, “Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?” have been answered by modern science, and to every question the answer is, The Sun. He is parent of the snow and hail, as he is of the moist warm rains of summer, of the ice which crowns the everlasting hills, and of the mist which rises from the valleys beneath his morning rays. ”

“ When the auroral crown is fully formed, and the vault of heaven is covered with the auroral banners, waving hither and thither silently, now fading from view, anon glowing with more intense splendour, the mind is not less impressed with a sense of the wondrous powers which surround us than when, as the forked lightnings leap from the thundercloud, the whole heavens glow with violet light, and then sink suddenly into darkness. ”

“ When we look at the ruins of some ancient abbey, Netley, Melrose, or Tintern, at Stonehenge in its solitude on the Wiltshire plains, or the pyramids of the sandy tracts that border on the Nile, near Cairo, the idea suggested to the mind is that of a vast antiquity. The thoughts range back to the time when the builders of the structure before us were living men; and as we picture how generation after generation has passed away since their time, we are forcibly impressed with the nothingness of our lives compared with the life-time of our race. ”

“ When we remember that the enormous icebergs of the Arctic and Antarctic seas, the snow-caps which crown the Alps and Andes and Himalayas, and the glaciers which urge their way with resistless force down the mountain valleys, are all made up of these delicate and beautiful snow-flowers, we are struck with the force of the strange contrasts which Nature presents to our contemplation. ”

“ Let us picture to ourselves for a [Pg 61] moment the central sun, the earth, and the earth's path, not as they really are, for the mind refuses altogether to picture the dimensions even of the earth, which is but an atom compared with the sun, whose own proportions, in turn, mighty though they are, sink into utter insignificance compared with the enormous scale of the orbit in which the earth travels around him. Let us reduce the scale of the entire system to one 500-millionth part of its real value: even then we have a tolerably large orbit to imagine. ”

“ The shadows do not travel in the same apparent paths as the satellites themselves across the disc, but (in an inverting telescope) below from August to January, and above from February to July.
We come now to the most charming telescopic object in the heavens—the planet Saturn. Inferior only to Jupiter in mass and volume, this planet surpasses him in the magnificence of his system. Seen in a telescope of adequate power, Saturn is an object of surpassing loveliness. He must be an unimaginative man who can see Saturn for the first time in such a telescope, without a feeling of awe and amazement. ”

“ Thus, contemplating a tree which they supposed to be like their own in its nature, they might say, 'Yonder is a tree system crowded with fruits, each the abode of many myriads of creatures like ourselves:' whereas in reality the tree might be utterly unlike their own, might not yet have reached or might long since have passed the fruit-bearing stage, might when in that stage bear fruit utterly unlike any they could even imagine, and each such fruit during its brief life-bearing condition might be inhabited by living beings utterly unlike any creatures they could conceive. ”

“ We must acknowledge that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his God-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system,—with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” As it seems to me, man’s moral nature teaches the same lesson with equal, if not greater, significance. ”

“ Science says there is no dark space, and there is no ring of light; while the eye of science perceives something where the lunar halo shines which ordinary vision cannot recognise. Up yonder, many miles above the earth, science sees millions of crystals of ice, carried hither and thither—so light are they—by every movement of the air. Science sees these ice crystals deflecting the rays of moonlight, sifting the red rays from the orange, and these from the yellow, yellow from green, green from blue, blue from indigo, and indigo from violet. ”

“ Again, men wished to learn the true shape of the earth, and went hither and thither measuring its globe; but the moon, meanwhile, told the astronomer who remained at home a truer tale. They sought to learn the earth’s distance from the sun, and from this and that point they turned their telescopes on Venus in transit; but the moon set them nearer the truth, and that not by a few miles, but by 2,000,000 miles or more. We shall see that she has had something to say about our great terrestrial time-piece.
One of the great charms of the science of astronomy is, that it enables men to predict. ”

“ We may thus, at the outset, dismiss from our thoughts the idea that the planet Jupiter is necessarily to be regarded as an inhabited world merely because the only planet we are actually acquainted with is inhabited. The latter circumstance may be an excellent reason for regarding Mars or Venus as the abode of life; but the analogy can no more be extended to Jupiter than to the fixed stars, which certainly are not inhabited worlds. We must, in fact, consider the physical habitudes of Jupiter independently of all conceptions based upon terrestrial analogies. ”

“ Nearly all the greatest names in philosophy, literature, and science, and a great number of the greatest names in art, stand absolutely alone. We know nothing achieved by the father or grandfather of Shakspeare, or of Goethe, or Schiller, or Evans (George Eliot) , or Thackeray, or Dickens, or Huxley. None of Newton's family were in any way distinguished in mathematical or scientific work; nor do we know of a distinguished Laplace, or Lagrange, or Lavoisier, or Harvey, or Dalton, or Volta, or Faraday, besides those who made these names illustrious. ”

“ Although the moon is a pleasing and surprising telescopic object when full, the most interesting views of her features are obtained at other seasons. If we follow the moon as she waxes or wanes, we see the true nature of that rough and bleak mountain scenery, which when the moon is full is partially softened through the want of sharp contrasts of light and shadow. If we watch, even for half an hour only, the changing form of the ragged line separating light from darkness on the moon's disc, we cannot fail to be interested. ”

“ There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! ”

“ We are too apt, in studying the celestial objects, to forget that where all seems at nearly perfect rest, there may be processes of the utmost activity—nay, rather, of the utmost violence—taking place as it were under our very eyes, and yet not perceptible save to the eye of reason. Looking at Jupiter, under his ordinary aspect, even in the finest telescope, one would feel certain that a general calm prevailed over his mighty globe. ”

“ Compared with the vast periods of time thus brought before our thoughts as among the demonstrated yet inconceivable truths of science, the life-time of such a structure as the great pyramid seems but as the duration of a breath. Yet, viewed as men must view the works of man, the pyramids of Egypt derive a profound interest from their antiquity. Young, compared with the works of nature, they are, of all men's works, the most ancient. ”

“ In fact, our whole system of weights and measures is founded on the apparent diurnal motion of the sidereal system, that is, on the real diurnal rotation of the earth. We may look on the meridian-plane in which the great transit-telescope of the Greenwich Observatory is made to swing, as the gigantic hand of a mighty dial, a hand which, extending outwards among the stars, traces out for us, by its motion among them, the exact progress of time, and so gives us the means of weighing, measuring, and valuing terrestrial objects with an exactitude which is at present beyond our wants. ”

“ How, then, can we hope to appreciate the vastness of space whereof astronomy tells us? To the student of science attempting to conceive the immensities of whose existence he is assured, the same lesson might be taught in parable which the child of St. Augustine's vision taught the Numidian theologian. As reasonably might an infant hope to pour the waters of ocean into a hollow, scooped with his tiny fingers in the sand, as man to picture in his narrow mind the length and breadth and depth of the abysses of space in which our earth is lost. ”

“ The theory that genius will make its way, despite all obstacles, is like the popular notion that 'murder will out,' and other such fancies. We note when events happen which favour such notions, but we not only do not note—in the very nature of things it is impossible that we should have the chance of noting—cases unfavourable to a notion which, after all, is but a part of the general and altogether erroneous idea that what we think ought to be, will be. ”

“ No one would be so heartless, I think, as to reject, through an excess of scientific caution, a scheme which might issue in the saving of many lives from famine or from shipwreck. And on the other hand, no one, I think, would believe so ill of his fellow-men as to suppose for one moment that advantage could be taken of the sympathies which have been aroused by the Indian famine, or which may from time to time be excited by the record of great disasters by sea and land, to advocate bottomless schemes merely for purposes of personal advancement. ”

“ As the astronomer sees in the sun a more glorious object than the sun of the poet, recognising in imagination not only the visible splendour of that orb, but the mighty energy with which it is swaying the motions of a scheme of circling worlds, the wondrous activities at work throughout its entire frame, the inconceivable tumult which must prevail in that seemingly silent globe, so the glories of light, rightly understood, are far more impressive than as they appeal simply to the senses. ”

“ Scarcely anyone, I think, can have read the description of the shield without a feeling of wonder that Homer should describe the shield of a mortal hero as adorned with so many and such important objects. We find the sun and moon, the constellations, the waves of ocean, and a variety of other objects, better suited to adorn the temple of a great deity than the shield of a warrior, however noble and heroic. ”

“ Every very bright star, when close to the horizon, shows these colours, and so much the more distinctly as the star is the brighter. Sirius, which surpasses the brightest stars of the northern hemisphere full four times in lustre, shows these changes of colour so conspicuously that they were regarded as specially characteristic of this star, insomuch that Homer speaks of Sirius (not by name, but as the 'star of autumn') shining most beautifully 'when laved of ocean's wave'—that is, when close to the horizon. ”

“ And now, for the first time, ideas derived from her life before her illness seemed to be awakened within her. When pictures of flowers, trees, and animals were shown her, she was pleased; but when she was shown a landscape in which there was a river or a troubled sea, she became violently agitated, and a fit of spasmodic rigidity and insensibility immediately followed. The mere sight of water in motion made her shudder. Again, from an early stage of her illness she had derived pleasure from the proximity of a young man to whom she had been attached. ”

“ The science of our own time tells us a still stranger story. There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest, she says, but in his motion throbs like a mighty heart, still pulsating life to the worlds which circle round it. But while our powers of vision are limited to the narrow range of our present telescopes, we cannot watch the action of these great centres of energy, nor can we hope that the uproar of those remote fires will ever reach mortal ears, though to the mind's ear clear and distinct. ”

“ This fact would entitle us to conclude that no such planet exists if its existence had been merely conjectured, or if it had been deduced from any of the laws of planetary distance, or even if Leverrier or Adams had announced it as the probable result of planetary perturbations. If the finest telescopes cannot rediscover a planet which with the small power used by Lescarbault has a visible disc, within so limited an area of which the sun is the centre, or rather within a narrow belt of that circle, we should unhesitatingly declare that no such planet exists. ”

“ Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that the wave which swept the shores of Southern California, rising upwards of sixty feet above the ordinary sea-level, was absolutely the most imposing of all the indirect effects of the great earthquake. When we consider that even in San Pedro Bay, fully five thousand miles from the centre of disturbance, a wave twice the height of an ordinary house rolled in with unspeakable violence only a few hours after the occurrence of the earth-throe, we are most strikingly impressed with the tremendous energy of the earth’s movement. ”

“ There is, however, a grandeur in the interpretation placed by modern science upon these beautiful displays which dwarfs into littleness even such ideas as have been suggested by the terrors of superstition. We perceive that meteors are not mere terrestrial phenomena, nor of brief existence. They speak to us of domains in space compared with which the volume of our earth—nay, even the volume of the sun himself—is a mere point: of time-intervals compared with which the millions of years spoken of by geologists appear but as mere seconds. ”

“ PREFACE. The chief charm of Astronomy, with many, does not reside in the wonders revealed to us by the science, but in the lore and legends connected with its history, the strange fancies with which in old times it has been associated, the half-forgotten myths to which it has given birth. In our own times also, Astronomy has had its myths and fancies, its wild inventions, and startling paradoxes. ”

“ If we accept the opinion of Newton, which, indeed, seems to me indisputable, that matter cannot act through a vacuum, then we must admit the existence of properties, as yet unthought of, in the ether of space, or in some still more subtle universe permeating that ether. If, on the other hand, we accept the belief that matter can act at a distance, then is there no miracle, either of those believed in by mankind generally, or of those more generally rejected, which exceeds in marvellousness this wonder of all the wonders of physical science. ”