Various

“ As Adelaide entered, she looked round for Lucille, and perceived her standing near the dock, her earnest eyes fixed upon the prisoner, and encouraging him from time to time with a look of recognition and a smile. But notwithstanding all her efforts, the smile was a sad one; for her heart was heavy, and the appearance of the magistrate was not calculated to strengthen her hope. André had declared his innocence—his complete ignorance of the contents of the pocket-book his friend had placed in his hand; but his very intimacy with such men operated strongly against him. ”

“ She was one of those favoured beings whom no prosperity can spoil, no education entirely mislead, and whose very faults arise from the overflowings of a good and generous nature. The thought which agitated her now was one worthy of her gentle heart.
'Monsieur Lagnier,' she said earnestly, 'such beautiful hair could only have belonged to a young person. She must have been in great distress to part with it. Do you know her? Did she sell it to you? What is her name? I cannot bear to wear it: I shall be thinking of her continually.'
'Ah, Mademoiselle Adelaide, that is so like you! ”

“ Onwards the thin vapour goes, the sun waxing bigger and bigger with each stage of approach, until at last the little star has become a fiery globe, filling up half the heavens with its vast proportions, and stretching from the horizon to the zenith of the visible concave. ”

“ Were the facts of science thus generalised, it is surprising how comprehensive a knowledge of the whole system of the universe every person might have. Only generalise enough, and no one need to be ignorant. Just in proportion as a man has little time to bestow on learning, condense the more what you wish to impart, and the result, where there is any fair degree of preparedness, will be all the better. ”

“ They are but stray and chance visitors to the domains of our sun, and refuse to submit themselves, with the more regular members of their fraternity, to the regulation-arrangements of our system, or to appear punctually at the systematic roll-call therein instituted. They are the true free-wanderers of the Infinite, passing from shore to shore of immensity, and presenting themselves, for short and uncertain intervals, to star after star. ”

“ Few persons who caught a glimpse of that shining tail, either as it fitfully revealed itself in our heavens, or as it steadily blazed upon the opposite hemisphere of the earth, were led to form adequate notions of the magnificence of the object they were contemplating. No one, unaided by the teaching of science, could have conceived that the streak of light, so readily compressed within the narrow limits of an eye-glance, stretched out 170 millions of miles in length. ”

“ The advocates of the diffusion of useful knowledge among the great body of the people, found one of their greatest difficulties to lie in an inability on the part of the people themselves to see what benefit they were to derive from the knowledge proposed to be imparted. This knowledge consisted of such a huge mass of facts of all kinds, that few could overcome a sense of hopelessness as attending every endeavour to acquire it. ”

“ At this sight, André seemed suddenly to understand the cause of his arrest; he stood for an instant gazing at the notes with a countenance of horror; then, with an almost gigantic effort, he broke from the grasp which held him, and darted away in the direction which had before been taken by the young girl. He was immediately followed by the police; but although Adelaide and her friend remained for some time watching eagerly the pursuit, they were unable to ascertain whether he had succeeded in effecting his escape. ”

“ In two short hours, it had shifted its place from one side to the other of the solar sphere. In sixty little minutes, it had moved from a region in which the heat was forty thousand times greater than the fiercest burning of the earth's torrid zone, into another, in which the temperature was four times less. The comet might well have a glowing tail as it came from such a realm of fire. Flames that were colder by many hundred times, would make the dull black iron shine with incandescent brightness. ”

“ The comet's tail is believed by most of the illustrious astronomers of the day, to be the body converted into vapour by solar influence. If it be so, the vaporising process must be a much more subtile one than any that could be performed in our alembics, for the comet's substance is already all vapour before the distillation commences. The faintest stars have been seen shining through the densest parts of comets without the slightest loss of light, although they would have been effectually concealed by a trifling mist extending a few feet from the earth's surface. ”

“ The belief in the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction. If its mass had been of equal amount with the earth's mass, its attraction would have influenced the earth's movement in a like degree in return, and the earth would have been so held back in its orbitual progress in consequence, that the year would have been lengthened to the extent of three hours. ”

“ When the comet has approached comparatively near to the grand source of attraction, the speed of its accelerating motion has become so excessive, that it is able to withstand the augmented solicitation it is subjected to, and move outwards in a more direct course. It goes, however, slower and slower, and curving its journey less and less, until at last its motion in remote obscurity is again so sluggish, that the sun's attraction is once more predominant, and able to recall the truant towards its realms of light. ”

“ Light as the comet's substance is, it is not, however, light enough to escape the grasp of the sun's gravitating attraction. When the mass of thin vapour is rushing through the obscurity of starlit space, so far from the sun that the solar sphere looks but the brightest of the stellar host, it feels the influence of the solar mass, remote as it is, and is constrained to bend its course towards it. ”

“ We must recur after all to the maxim which it is mainly the object of this paper to impress—that judicious generalisation is the indispensable pre-requisite to a more general diffusion of knowledge. To bring it to an apothegm—Let the man of science in seeking to enlighten himself, pursue analysis; in seeking to enlighten the outer public, he has no chance but in synthesis. ”

“ The comet of 1680 shot out its tail through something like 100 million miles in a couple of days. Most probably, much of the matter that is thus thrown off from the cometic nucleus is never collected again, but is dissipated into space, and lost for ever to the comet. The tail of the comet of 1680 was seen in its greatest brilliancy soon before the solar approach; this was, however, an exception to the general rule. Comets nearly always have the finest tails, and present altogether the most beautiful appearance, immediately after they have been in the closest proximity to the sun. ”

“ It is to be feared, however, that the thing wanting is not the sufficiency of particulars out of which to make general or comprehensive truths, but that of the requisite intellectual power and habit on the part of the men of science. The constant working towards separate facts seems to disqualify the mind for grouping or clustering them. Hundreds can detect a new sphinx or butterfly in the fauna of a country or a county, and are content with such small results, for one who can lay a few facts together, and make one truth out of all. ”

“ The reader is probably aware, that convicts in prison, before quitting England, are subjected to a term of hard labour—proportionate in duration to the length of their sentences of transportation—and to a further term of hard labour on arriving in Australia. When the latter term has expired, if the prisoner has conducted himself well, he is presented with a ticket-of-leave, which confines him to a certain district, where he may engage to labour for his own benefit under an employer. ”

“ You have a hundred thousand species of plants to become acquainted with—to learn their names, and to what genera and orders they belong, besides everything like a knowledge of their habitats, their properties, and their physiology. Seeing that this is but one of the sciences, there might well be a pause before admitting that the moral and intellectual regeneration of our people was to be brought about by the useful-knowledge movement. ”

“ The comet's tail seems, in reality, to be a thin oblong case of vapour, formed out of the cometic substance by the increasing intensity of the sunshine, and enclosing the denser portion of that substance at one end. The diverging streams which it displays upon the sky are merely the retiring edges of the rounded case, where the greatest depth of luminous matter comes into sight. As the comet nears the sun, much of its substance is vaporised for the construction of this envelope ”

“ The light of the comet only differs from the light of a cloud that is drifted across the cerulean sky of noon, in the fact, that it is reflected from the inside as well as the outside of the vaporous substance. The material illuminated reflects light, and is permeated by light, at once. In this respect it resembles air as much as cloud—the blueness of the sky is the sunlit air seen through the lower and inner strata of itself. In the same way, the whiteness of the comet is sunlit vapour seen through portions of itself. ”

“ It is found, however, that Encke's Comet does indicate the presence of some such resistance. It goes slower and slower with each return, and contracts the dimensions of its elliptical journey progressively. But it must be remembered, that this is one of the close comets that never gets well out of the solar domain in which our neighbouring planets float. The resisting medium which opposes its journey may be merely an ethereal solar atmosphere surrounding the sun, as our air surrounds the earth, but spreading to distances of millions instead of tens of miles. ”

“ Not only a vapour-forming power, but also a vapour-drifting power, is brought into play in the process of tail formation; and this latter must be some occult agent of considerable interest in a scientific point of view, as well as of considerable importance in a dynamic one, for it is a principle evidently antagonistic to the great prevailing attribute of gravitation, so universally present in matter. The comet's tail is the only substance known that is repelled instead of being attracted by the sun. ”

“ In her waking-life, she has a remarkably treacherous memory for poetry, being seldom able to repeat a single verse even of Isaac Watts without a mistake. Here, however, she had carried two entire verses safe and sound out of her sleep into her waking existence. It was therefore a double wonder. She has accordingly got up a theory, that her mind is at its best in her sleep, and is judged of at a disadvantage in its daylight moments. In sleep lies her principal life. Waking is an inferior exceptive kind of existence, into which she is dragged by the base exigencies of the world. ”

“ On the other hand, it must be remembered also that starlight passes through universal space, and is everywhere spread out therein, and that it is hardly possible to think of starlight as an existence without some sort of material reality. Some physicists believe that Encke's Comet, with its retarded motions, will some day fall into the sun; while others fancy that such a consummation can never take place, because successive portions of its substance will be thrown off by the tail-forming process with each perihelion return ”

“ In most instances, comets move in space, about the sun, in ellipses so very lengthened, that their paths seem to be parabolas as long as the cloudy bodies are visible in the sky. Two of them, Ollier's Comet and Halley's, are known to return into sight after intervals of seventy-four and seventy-six years, during which they have visited portions of space a few hundred millions of miles further than the orbit of Neptune. ”

“ Most comets appear to have bright centres—nuclei, as they are called; but these nuclei are not solid bodies, for as soon as they are viewed by powerful telescopes, they become as diffused and transparent as the fainter cometic substance. Comets are properly atmospheres without contained spheres; enormous clouds rushing along in space, and bathed with its sunshine, for they have no light excepting sunlight. They become brighter and brighter as they get deeper within the solar glare, and dimmer and paler as they float outwards from the same. ”

“ Thin comet vapours drift through space, sustained by exactly the same influences that uphold dense planetary spheres. They are supported in the void by the combined effects of motion and attraction. Their own impetus strives to carry them one way, while the sun's attraction draws them another, and they are thus constrained to move along paths that are intermediate to the lines of the two impulses. ”

“ But it is not necessary that every member of the public should follow the man of science into all these minutiæ. It is not required of him, that he should have the names of even the seventy families of plants at his finger-ends, though that is not beyond the reach of most people. Some summation of the facts, some adroit generalisation, if such be attainable, is enough for him. The man of science is, as it were, a workman employed in rearing up a structure for the man of the world to look at or live in. ”

“ One could almost believe, that there is a greater want of comprehensive intellect in the walks of science, than in some other fields of labour which make less pretension to an exertion of the mental faculties: for example, merchandise. And does not that very appearance of continual peddling amongst trifles, in some degree prevent the highest kind of minds from going into the fields of science? ”