Garrett Putman Serviss

“ Every star, wherever it may be situated, is attracted by its fellow-stars from many sides at once, and although the force is minimized by distance, yet in the course of many ages its effects must become manifest.
Looked at from another side, is there not something immensely stimulating and pleasing to the imagination in the idea of so stupendous a journey, which makes all of us the greatest of travelers? In the course of a long life a man is transported through space thirty thousand million miles; Halley’s Comet does not travel one-quarter as far in making one of its immense circuits. ”

“ Rocky pinnacles and needles shoot up into the sunlight out of the black depths. Down sinks the line of light, mile after mile, and continually new precipices and cliffs are brought into view, until at last the vast floor is attained and begins to be illuminated. In the meanwhile the sun’s rays, darting across the gulf, have touched the summits of the central peaks, twenty or thirty miles from the crater’s inmost edge, and they immediately kindle and blaze like huge stars amid the darkness. ”

“ Even the moon did not blow up when it was wrecked by volcanoes. The explosive nebulæ and new stars are far away in space, and suggest no connection with such a catastrophe as the bursting of a planet into hundreds of pieces. We cannot conceive of a great globe thousands of miles in diameter resembling a pellet of gunpowder only awaiting the touch of a match to cause its sudden disruption. Somehow the thought of human agency obtrudes itself in connection with the word “explosion,” and we smile at the idea that giant powder or nitro-glycerine could blow up a planet. ”

“ Among all the strange things that the Milky Way contains there is nothing so extraordinary as itself. Every astronomer must many times have found himself marveling at it in those comparatively rare nights when it shows all its beauty and all its strangeness. In its great broken rifts, divisions, and spirals are found the gigantic prototypes of similar forms in its star-clouds and clusters. As we have said, it determines the general shape of the whole sidereal system. Some of the brightest stars in the sky appear to hang like jewels suspended at the ends of tassels dropped from the Galaxy. ”

“ One would say that if the terrific coil in Triangulum has all but destroyed itself in its fury, this one on the contrary has just begun its self-demolition. As one gazes one seems to see in it the smooth, swift, accelerating motion that precedes catastrophe. The central part is still intact, dense, and uniform in texture. How graceful are the spirals that smoothly rise from its oval rim and, gemmed with little stars, wind off into the darkness until they have become as delicate as threads of gossamer! ”

“ Such, in very brief form, is the celebrated theory of Mars as an inhabited world. It certainly captivates the imagination, and if we believe it to represent the facts, we cannot but watch with the deepest sympathy this gallant struggle of an intellectual race to preserve its planet from the effects of advancing age and death. We may, indeed, wonder whether our own humanity, confronted by such a calamity, could be counted on to meet the emergency with equal stoutness of heart and inexhaustibleness of resource. ”

“ As all the world knows, the sun, a blinding globe pouring forth an inconceivable quantity of light and heat, whose daily passage through the sky is caused by the earth’s rotation on its axis, constitutes the most important phenomenon of terrestial existence. Viewed with a dark glass to take off the glare, or with a telescope, its rim is seen to be a sharp and smooth circle, and nothing but dark sky is visible around it. Except for the interference of the moon, we should probably never have known that there is any more of the sun than our eyes ordinarily see. ”

“ If we could take our stand somewhere in the midst of immensity and, with vision of infinite reach, look about us, we should perhaps see a countless number of stellar systems, amid which ours would be unnoticeable, like a single star among the multitude glittering in the terrestial sky on a clear night. ”

“ As the inhabitants of the most elegant château, with its gardens, parks, and crowds of attendants, would die of loneliness if they did not know that they have neighbors, though not seen, and that a living world of indefinite extent surrounds them, so we, when we perceive that the universe has limits, wish to feel that it is not solitary; that beyond the hedges and the hills there are other centers of life and activity. Could anything be more terrible than the thought of an isolated universe? ”

“ Then the Milky Way, with its wide-flung garland of stars, is afloat like a tiny smoke-wreath amid a horror of immeasurable vacancy, or it is an evanescent and solitary ring of sparkling froth cast up for a moment on the viewless billows of immensity. From such conclusions the mind instinctively shrinks. It prefers to think that there is something beyond, though we cannot see it. Even the universe could not bear to be alone—a Crusoe lost in the Cosmos! ”

“ Let any thoughtful person who is acquainted with the general facts of astronomy look up at the heavens some night when they appear in their greatest splendor, and ask himself what is the strongest impression that they make upon his mind. He may not find it easy to frame an answer, but when he has succeeded it will probably be to the effect that the stars give him an impression of the universality of intelligence; they make him feel, as the sun and the moon cannot do, that his world is not alone ”

“ No more overwhelming impression of the frightful depths of space in which the stars are buried can be obtained than by reflecting upon the fact that a star whose actual motion across the line of sight amounts to two hundred miles per second does not change its apparent place in the sky, in the course of a thousand years, sufficiently to be noticed by the casual observer of the heavens! ”

“ The narrow ideas of the old geocentric theology, which made the earth God’s especial footstool, and man his only rational creature, fall away from him like a veil that had obscured his vision; they are impossible in the presence of what he sees above. Thus the natural tendency, in the light of modern progress, is to regard the universe as everywhere filled with life.
But science, which is responsible for this broadening of men’s thoughts concerning the universality of life, itself proceeds to set limits. ”

“ We are driven, then, to believe that the universal night which envelopes us is not tenantless; that as we stare out of the star-framed windows of the Galaxy and see nothing but uniform blackness, the fault is with our eyes or is due to an obscuring medium. Since our universe is limited in extent, there must be other universes beyond it on all sides. ”

“ Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter revolves the most remarkable system of little bodies with which we are acquainted—the Asteroids, or Minor Planets. Some six hundred are now known, and they may actually number thousands. They form virtually a ring about the sun. The most striking general fact about them is that they occupy the place in the sky which should be occupied, according to Bode’s Law, by a single large planet. This fact, as we shall see, has led to the invention of one of the most extraordinary theories in astronomy—viz., that of the explosion of a world! ”

“ We do not know that gravitation acts beyond the visible universe, but it is reasonable to suppose that it does. At any rate, if we let go its sustaining hand we are lost, and can only wander hopelessly in our speculations, like children astray. If the empire of gravitation is infinite, then the various outer systems must have some, though measuring by our standards an imperceptible, attractive influence upon each other, for gravitation never lets go its hold, however great the space over which it is required to act. ”

“ But whatever explanation may eventually be found for the motions of the stars, the knowledge of the existence of those motions must always afford a new charm to the contemplative observer of the heavens, for they impart a sense of life to the starry system that would otherwise be lacking. A stagnant universe, with every star fixed immovably in its place, would not content the imagination or satisfy our longing for ceaseless activity. ”

“ It would be easier, certainly, to conceive of openings in a thin belt than in a massive ring, for in the first case they would resemble mere rifts and breaks, while in the second they would be like wells or bore-holes. Then, too, the fact that the Milky Way is not a continuous body but is made up of stars whose actual distances apart is great, offers another quandary; persistent and sharply bordered apertures in such an assemblage are a priori as improbable, if not impossible, as straight, narrow holes running through a swarm of bees. ”

“ The majestic grandeur of the evolutions of the celestial hosts, the inconceivable vastness of the fields of space in which they are executed, the countless numbers, the immeasurable distances, the involved convolutions, the flocking and the scattering, the interpenetrating marches and countermarches, the strange community of impulsion affecting stars that are wide apart in space and causing them to traverse the general movement about them like aides and despatch-bearers on a battle-field—all these arouse an intensity of interest which is heightened by the mystery behind them. ”

“ The sun is only a little more than a hundred times its own diameter away from the earth. Why, then, with the subtle connection between them afforded by the ether which conveys to us the blinding solar light and the life-sustaining solar heat, should it be so difficult to believe that the sun’s enormous electric energies find a way to us also? No doubt the impulse coming from the sun acts upon the earth after the manner of a touch upon a trigger, releasing energies which are already stored up in our planet. ”

“ As handled by the Greeks from prehistoric times, the constellation myths became the very soul of poetry. The imagination of that wonderful race idealized the principal star groups so effectively that the figures and traditions thus attached to them have, for civilized mankind, displaced all others, just as Greek art in its highest forms stands without parallel and eclipses every rival. ”

“ If you are out-of-doors soon after sunset—say, on an evening late in the month of February—you may perceive, just after the angry flush of the dying winter’s day has faded from the sky, a pale ghostly presence rising above the place where the sun went down. ”

“ When out of the brief twilight of intertropical lands, where the sun drops vertically to the horizon and night rushes on like a wave of darkness, the Zodiacal Light shoots to the very zenith, its color is described as a golden tint, entirely different from the silvery sheen of the Milky Way. ”

“ But whatever the former condition of the moon may have been, its existing appearance gives it a resistless fascination, and it bears so clearly the story of a vast catastrophe sculptured on its rocky face that the thoughtful observer cannot look upon it without a feeling of awe. The gigantic character of the lunar features impresses the beholder not less than the universality of the play of destructive forces which they attest. Let us make a few comparisons. Take the lunar crater called “Tycho”, which is a typical example of its kind. ”

“ The story has often been repeated, but it never loses interest, how Tycho, going home that evening, saw people in the street pointing and staring at the sky directly over their heads, and following the direction of their hands and eyes he was astonished to see, near the zenith, an unknown star of surpassing brilliance. It outshone the planet Jupiter, and was therefore far brighter than the first magnitude. There was not another star in the heavens that could be compared with it in splendor. ”

“ More rare than meteors or falling stars, and more startling, except that they never appear in showers, are the huge balls of fire which occasionally dart through the sky, lighting up the landscapes beneath with their glare, leaving trains of sparks behind them, often producing peals of thunder when they explode, and in many cases falling upon the earth and burying themselves from a few inches to several feet in the soil, from which, more than once, they have been picked up while yet hot and fuming. ”