S. P. Langley

“ Plate 93 shows the aerodrome shortly after it touched the water and had been almost completely submerged, in spite of its floats, by the very strong tide which was running. Though these plates show all that photographs can, they give no adequate idea of the wonder and beauty of the machine when actually in flight. For while the graceful lines of the machine make it very attractive to the eye even when stationary, yet when it is actually in flight it seems veritably endowed with life and intelligence, and the spectacle holds the observer awed and breathless until the flight is ended. ”

“ Yet, as the day declines, and the glow of the sunset spreads up to the zenith, there comes out in it the white-shining evening star, which not the light, but the darkness, makes visible; and as the last ruddy twilight fades, not only this neighbor-world, whose light is fed from the sunken sun, but other stars appear, themselves self-shining suns, which were above us all through the day, unseen because of the very light.
As night draws on, we may see the occasional flash of a shooting-star, or perhaps the auroral streamers spreading over the heavens ”

“ They were there just the same a hundred generations ago, before the Pyramids were built; and they will tremble there still, when the Pyramids have been worn down to dust with the blowing of the desert sand against their granite sides. They watched the earth grow fit for man long before man came, and they will doubtless be shining on when our poor human race itself has disappeared from the surface of this planet. ”

“ It is to be remembered that the mechanical difficulties of artificial flight have been so great that, so far as is known, never at any time in the history of the world previous to my experiment of May, 1896, had any such mechanism, however actuated, sustained itself in the air for more than a few seconds—never, for instance, a single half-minute—and those models which had sustained themselves for these few seconds, had been in almost every case actuated by rubber springs, and had been of such a size that they should hardly be described as more than toys. ”

“ We were, at any rate, witnessing a catastrophe which no earthly experience can give us a notion of, in a field of action so remote that the flash of light which brought the news was unknown years on the way, so that all this—strange but now familiar thought—occurred long before we saw it happen. The star faded in a few days to invisibility to the naked eye, though not to the telescope; and, in fact, all these phenomena at present appear rather to be enormous and sudden enlargements of the light of existing bodies than the creation of absolutely new ones ”

“ I have read somewhere a story about a race of ephemeral insects who live but an hour. To those who are born in the early morning the sunrise is the time of youth. They die of old age while his beams are yet gathering force, and only their descendants live on to midday; while it is another race which sees the sun decline, from that which saw him rise. Imagine the sun about to set, and the whole nation of mites gathered under the shadow of some mushroom (to them ancient as the sun itself) to hear what their wisest philosopher has to say of the gloomy prospect. ”

“ THE PLANETS AND THE MOON. When we look up at the heavens, we see, if we watch through the night, the host of stars rising in the east and passing above us to sink in the west, always at the same distance and in unchanging order, each seeming a point of light as feeble as the glow-worm’s shine in the meadow over which they are rising, each flickering as though the evening wind would blow it out. ”

“ It is always there, not hidden in any way, and yet not seen, only because it is overpowered by the intenser brilliancy of the Photosphere, as a glow-worm’s shine would be if it were put beside an electric light. Outside all is the strange shape, which represents the mysterious Corona, seen by the naked eye in a total eclipse, but at all other times invisible even to telescope and spectroscope, and of whose true nature we are nearly ignorant from lack of opportunity to study it. ”

“ The curvature of the moon’s surface is so much greater than ours, that it would hide the spurs of hills which buttress the southern slopes of Archimedes, leaving only the walls of the great mountain ring visible in the extremest horizon, while between us and them would extend what some still maintain to have been the bed of an ancient lunar ocean, though assuredly no water exists there now. ”

“ Of the whole celestial army which the naked eye watches, there are five stars which do change their places in the ranks, and these change in an irregular and capricious manner, going about among the others, now forward and now back, as if lost and wandering through the sky. These wanderers were long since known by distinct names, as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and believed to be nearer than the others; and they are, in fact, companions to the earth and fed like it by the warmth of our sun, and like the moon are visible by the sunlight which they reflect to us. ”

“ In considering the results to be drawn from this glance we have taken at some facts of modern observation, if it be asked, not only what the facts are, but what lessons the facts themselves have to teach, there is more than one answer, for the moral of a story depends on the one who draws it, and we may look on our story of the heavens from the point of view either of our own importance or of our own insignificance. In the one case we behold the universe as a sort of reflex of our own selves, mirroring in vast proportions of time and space our own destiny ”

“ It used to be supposed that we were absolutely isolated, not only from the stars but from other planets, by vast empty spaces extending from world to world,—regions altogether vacant except for some vagrant comet; but of late years we are growing to have new ideas on this subject, and not only to consider space as far from void or tenantless, but to admit, as a possibility at least, that there is a sort of continuity between our very earth’s surface, the air above it, and all which lies beyond the blue overarching dome of our own sky. ”

“ But,—wonderful and incomprehensible feature!—shot out from the head, almost as straight as a ray of light itself, but fainter than the moonbeam, now appears an extraordinary addition, a sort of spur, which we can hardly call a new tail, it is so unlike the old one, but which appears to have been darted out into space as if by some mysterious force acting through the head itself. ”

“ If we look up at the clock, and as we watch the pendulum recall that we have moved about nineteen miles at every beat, or in less than three minutes, over a distance greater than that which divides New York from Liverpool, we still probably but very imperfectly realize the fact that (dropping all metaphor) the earth is really a great projectile, heavier than the heaviest of her surface rocks, and traversing space with a velocity of over sixty times that of the cannon-ball. ”

“ The photograph has transported us already so near the sun’s surface that we have seen details there invisible to the naked eye. We have seen that what we have called “spots” are indeed regions whose actual vastness surpasses the vague immensity of a dream, and it will not cause surprise that in them is a temperature which also surpasses greatly that of the hottest furnace. We shall see later, in fact, that the whole surface is composed largely of metals turned into vapor in this heat, and that if we could indeed drop our great globe itself upon the sun, it would be dissipated as a snow-flake. ”

“ It seems pitted, torn, and rent by the past action of long-dead fires, till its surface is like a piece of porous cinder under the magnifying-glass,—a burnt-out cinder of a planet, which rolls through the void like a ruin of what has been; and, more significant still, this surface is wrinkled everywhere, till the analogy with an old and shrivelled face or hand or fruit (Figs. 73 and 75) , where the puckered skin is folded about a shrunken centre, forces itself on our attention, and suggests a common cause,—a something underlying the analogy, and making it more than a mere resemblance. ”

“ Every color that is lovely in the rainbow or the flower, every hue that is vivid in a ribbon or sombre in the grave harmonies of some old Persian rug, the metallic lustre of the humming-bird or the sober imperial yellow71 of precious china,—all these have no existence as color apart from the seeing eye, and all have their fount and origin in the sun itself. ”

“ Where its first beams are kindling, the summits cast their shadows illimitedly over the darkening plains away on the right, until they melt away into the night,—a night which is not utterly black, for even here a subdued radiance comes from the earth-shine of our own world in the sky. ”

“ All of us have seen shooting stars, and they are indeed something probably as old as this world, and have left their record in mythology as well as in history. According to Moslem tradition, the evil genii are accustomed to fly at night up to the confines of heaven in order to overhear the conversation of the angels, and the shooting stars are the fiery arrows hurled by the latter at their lurking foes, with so good an aim that we are told that for every falling star we may be sure that there is one spirit of evil the less in the world. ”

“ The sky is cloudless, and the air so clear that all idea of the real distance and size of things is lost. The mountains, which rise in tremendous precipices above him, seem like moss-covered rocks close at hand, on the tops of which, here and there, a white cloth has been dropped ”

“ The whole system of rings is of the most amazing thinness, for it is probably thinner in proportion to its size than the paper on which this is printed is to the width of the page; and when it is turned edgewise to us, it disappears to all but the most powerful telescopes, in which it looks then like the thinnest conceivable line of light, on which the moons have been seen projected, appearing like beads sliding along a golden wire. ”

“ We cannot assert that there are any bounds to man’s invention, or that science may not, by some means as unknown to us as the spectroscope was to our grandfathers, achieve what now seems impossible; but to our present knowledge no such means exist, though we are not forbidden to look at the ruddy planet with the feeling that it may hold possibilities more interesting to our humanity than all the wonders of the sun, and all the uninhabitable immensities of his other worlds. ”

“ Within this area, however, the spectacle is one of which, though the man of science may prosaically state the facts, perhaps only the poet could render the impression.
We can faintly picture, perhaps, how it would seem, from a station near the lunar orbit, to see the moon—a moving world—rush by with a velocity greater than that of the cannon-ball in its swiftest flight; but with equal speed its shadow actually travels along the earth. And now, if we return from our imaginary station to a real one here below, we are better prepared to see why this flying shadow is such a unique spectacle ”

“ The coal-beds and the forests are to the sun what the fly-wheel is to the engine: all their power comes from him; they retain a little of it in store, but very little by comparison with the original; and were the change we have already spoken of to come over the sun’s circulation,—were the solar engine disconnected from us,—we could go on perhaps a short time at the cost of this store, but when this was over it would be over with us, and all would be still here too. ”

“ The infant stretches out its hand to grasp the Pleiades; but when the child has become an old man the “seven stars” are still there unchanged, dim only in his aged sight, and proving themselves the enduring substance, while it is his own life which has gone, as the shine of the glow-worm in the night. ”

“ If the needle swings to the right or left, the light-spot vibrates with it, and the line it traces becomes sinuous, or more and more sharply zigzagged as the needle shivers under the unknown forces which control it. ”

“ It is owing to an atmosphere which surrounds the sun, as the air does the earth. When we look horizontally through our own air, as at sunrise and sunset, we gaze through greater thicknesses of it than when we turn our eyes to the zenith. So when we look at the edge of the sun, the line of sight passes through greater depths of this solar atmosphere, and it dims the light shining behind it more than at the centre, where it is thin. ”

“ If we would look into the future, also, we find that at the present rate we may say that the sun’s heat-supply is enough to last for some such term as four or five million years before it sensibly fails. It is certainly remarkable that by the aid of our science man can look out from this “bank and shoal of time,” where his fleeting existence is spent, not only back on the almost infinite lapse of ages past, but that he can forecast with some sort of assurance what is to happen in an almost infinitely distant future, long after the human race itself will have disappeared from its present home. ”