Richard A. Proctor

“ 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. ”

“ Thus they learn the sun’s distance precisely as a rifleman learns the distance of a line of soldiers when he has ascertained their apparent size—for only at a certain distance can an object of known size have a certain apparent size. ”

“ The ice shares the motion of the tidal wave, which has not to pass under the ice, but to lift it. This, of course, it does quite as readily as though there were no ice, but only the same weight of water. The mere weight of the ice counts simply for nothing. The tidal wave would rise as easily in the British Channel if a million Great Easterns were floating there as if there was not even a cock-boat; and the weight of ice, no matter how thick or extensive, would be similarly ineffective to restrain the great wave which the sun and moon send coursing twice a day athwart our oceans. ”

“ So far as mere existence is concerned, heat-forming food may be looked upon as the real fuel on which the lamp of life is sustained. But man, considered as a working being, cannot exist without energy-forming food. All work, whether of the brain or of the limbs, involves the exhaustion of nervous and muscular matter; and unless the exhausted matter be renewed, the work must come to an end. The supply of heat-giving food may be compared to the supply of fuel for the fire of a steam-engine. ”

“ But wonderful as is the variety seen within the planetary system, the variety within the sidereal system is infinitely more amazing. Besides the single suns, there are groups and systems and streams of primary suns; there are whole galaxies of minor orbs; there are clustering stellar aggregations, showing every variety of richness, of figure, and of distribution; there are all the various forms of nebulæ, resolvable and irresolvable, circular, elliptical, and spiral; and lastly, there are irregular masses of luminous gas, clinging in fantastic convolutions around stars and star-systems. ”

“ We know how, as the circles widen, the height of the wave grows less and less, until, at no great distance from the centre of disturbance, the wave can no longer be discerned, so slight is the slope of its advancing and following faces. How tremendous, then, must have been the upheaval of the bed of ocean by which wave-circles were sent across the Pacific, retaining, after travelling 5000 miles from the centre of disturbance, the height of a two-storied house! ”

“ Supposing even it were not only proved that sun-spots exert such and such effects, but that this knowledge can avail to help us to measures of special precaution, how is the study of the sun going to advance our knowledge? In passing, let it be remarked that already an enormous number of workers are engaged in studying the sun in every part of the world. The sun is watched on every fine day, in every quarter of the earth, with the telescope, analyzed with the spectroscope, his prominences counted and measured, his surface photographed, and so forth. ”

“ It would, in fact, be absurd to suppose that Newton, who had advanced, advocated, and eventually established, the noblest scientific theory the world has known, would ever have expressed an objection to theorizing, as he is commonly understood to have done by those who interpret his “hypotheses non fingo” in the sense which finds favour with M. Cornu. But apart from this, Newton definitely indicates what he means by hypotheses. “I frame no hypotheses,” he says, “for whatever is not deduced from phenomena is to be called an hypothesis.” ”

“ It has been established by astronomers and physicists that an important portion of the earth’s heat-supply is derived from the stars.
Following on these fanciful speculations came Aristotle’s theory of dew—celebrated as one of the most remarkable instances of the approximation which may sometimes be made to the truth by clever reasoning on insufficient observations. For we must not fall into the mistake of supposing, as many have done, that Aristotle framed hypotheses without making observations; indeed, there has seldom lived a philosopher who has made more observations than he did. ”

“ If astronomers should only be as fortunate hereafter in dealing with the problem of determining the distances of the stars, as they have been with the question of the sun’s distance, we may hope for knowledge respecting the structure of the universe such as even the Herschels despaired of our ever gaining. Yet this problem of determining star-distances does not seem more intractable, now, than the problem of measuring the sun’s distance appeared only two centuries ago. ”

“ Light travels from every self-luminous body in waves which sweep through the ether of space at the rate of 185,000 miles per second. The whole of that region of space over which astronomers have extended their survey, and doubtless a region many millions of millions of times more extended, may be compared to a wave-tossed sea, only that instead of a wave-tossed surface, there is wave-tossed space. At every point, through every point, along every line, athwart every line, myriads of light-waves are at all times rushing with the inconceivable velocity just mentioned. ”

“ I propose to exhibit, in a popular manner, some of the more important practical conclusions to which men of science have been led by their investigations into these questions.
The human body has been compared to a lamp in which a flame is burning. In some respects the comparison is a most apt one, as we shall see presently. But man does more than live; he works,—with his brain or with his muscles. And therefore the human frame may be more justly compared to a steam-engine than to the flame of a lamp. ”

“ Instead of millions of inert masses, we see the whole heavens instinct with energy—astir with busy life. The great masses of luminous vapour, though occupying countless millions of cubic miles of space, are moved by unknown forces like clouds before the summer breeze; star-mist is condensing into clusters; star-clusters are forming into suns ”

“ Even now continents are being slowly depressed or upheaved, even now mountain ranges are being raised to a different level, table-lands are being formed, great valleys are being gradually scooped out; old shore-lines shift their place, old soundings vary; the sea advances in one place and retires in another; on every side nature’s plastic hand is still at work, modelling and remodelling the earth, and making it constantly a fit abode for those who dwell upon it. ”

“ A century or so hence astronomers will smile (though not disdainfully) at these feeble efforts, much as we smile now in contemplating the puny telescopes with which Galileo and his contemporaries studied the star-depths. And we may well believe that largely as the knowledge gained by telescopists in our own time surpasses that which Galileo obtained, so will spectroscopists a few generations hence have gained a far wider and deeper insight into the constitution and movements of the stellar universe than the spectroscopists of our own day dare even hope to attain. ”

“ In reality, all the marvels of electric telegraphy are involved, so to speak, in the great marvel of electricity itself, a phenomenon as yet utterly beyond the interpretation of physicists, though not more so than its fellow marvels, light and heat. We may, indeed, draw a comparison between some of the most wonderful results which have recently been achieved by the study of heat and light and those effected in the application of electricity to telegraphy. ”

“ If we rightly view the many methods devised for dealing with the easier task, we must admit that the more difficult—which, by the way, is in reality infinitely the more interesting—cannot be regarded as so utterly hopeless as, with our present methods and appliances, it appears to be. True, we know only the distances of two or three stars, approximately, and have means of forming a vague opinion about the distances of only a dozen others, or thereabouts, while at distances now immeasurable lie six thousand stars visible to the eye, and twenty millions within range of the telescope. ”

“ But when I had seen that bodies on the surface of the earth become, during a still and serene night, colder than the atmosphere, by radiating their heat to the heavens, I perceived immediately a just reason for the practice which I had before deemed useless. ”

“ We can no more infer the actual temperature of Jupiter’s surface from the temperature of the layers which produce his absorption-spectrum, than a visitor who should view our earth from outer space, observing the low temperature of the air ten or twelve miles above the sea-level, could infer thence the actual temperature of the earth’s surface. ”

“ No one thinks of urging against the ordinary theory that men form only a single species, the objection that none of the other families of the human race can be regarded as the progenitor of the Caucasian family, seeing that though the Mongolian type is nearer in some respects, the Ethiopian is nearer in others, the American in others, the Malay in yet others. We find in this the perfect analogue of what is recognized in the relationships between families all belonging to one nation, or even to one small branch of a nation. ”

“ During the day, the sun seems to pour forth his heat with reckless profusion, yet all the while it is being silently stored up; during the night, again, the earth seems to be radiating her heat too rapidly into space, yet all the while a process is going on by which the loss of heat is adequately compensated. Every particle of dew which we brush from the blades of grass, as we take our morning rambles, is an evidence of the preservative action of nature. ”

“ Nothing can be plainer, however, than Darwin’s contradiction of this genealogy for the human races. Not only does he not for a moment countenance the belief that the present races of monkeys and apes can be arranged in a series gradually approximating more and more nearly to man, not only does he reject the belief that man is descended from any present existing anthropoid ape, but he even denies that the progenitor of man resembled any known ape. ”

“ THE USE AND ABUSE OF FOOD. Francis Bacon has laid it down as an axiom that experiment is the foundation of all real progress in knowledge. “Man,” he said, “as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature permit him, and neither knows nor is capable of more.”41 It would seem, then, as if there could be no subject on which man should be better informed than on the value of various articles of food, and the quantity in which each should be used. ”

“ Men might have gone on for centuries, we may conceive, noting the recurrence of seed-time and harvest-time, summer and winter, recognizing the periodical returns of heat and cold, and (in some regions) of dry seasons and wet seasons, of calm and storm, and so forth, without perceiving that the sun runs through his changes of diurnal motion in the same cyclic period. We can imagine that some few who might notice the connection between the two orders of celestial phenomena would be anxious to spread their faith in the association among their less observant brethren. ”

“ THE LEVELLING POWER OF RAIN. It has been recognized, ever since geology has become truly a science, that the two chief powers at work in remodelling the earth’s surface, are fire and water. Of these powers one is in the main destructive, and the other preservative. Were it not for the earth’s vulcanian energies, there can be no question that this world would long since have been rendered unfit for life,—at least of higher types than we recognize among sea creatures. For at all times igneous causes are at work, levelling the land, however slowly ”