Myths and Marvels of Astronomy Part 16

'All unawares Flutt'ring his pennons vain, plumb down he drops Ten thousand fathoms deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not by ill chance The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft,'

yet this was written nearly a quarter of a century before Newton had established the law of gravity. Moreover, there is no evidence to show in what direction Satan fell; 'above is below and below above,' says Richter, 'to one stripped of gravitating body;' and whether Satan was under the influence of gravity or not, he would be practically exempt from its action when in the midst of that 'dark, illimitable ocean' of s.p.a.ce,

'Without bound, Without dimensions, where length, breadth, and height, And time and place are lost.'

His lighting 'on Niphates' top,' and overleaping the gate of Paradise, may be used as arguments either way. On the whole, I must (according to my present lights) claim for Satan a freedom from all scientific restraints. This freedom is exemplified by his showing all the kingdoms of the world from an exceeding high mountain, thus affording the first practical demonstration of the flat-earth theory, the maintenance of which led to poor Mr. Hampden's incarceration.

[49] The _Sun_ itself claimed to have established the veracity of the account in a manner strongly recalling a well-known argument used by orthodox believers in the Bible account of the cosmogony. Either, say these, Moses discovered how the world was made, or the facts were revealed to him by some one who had made the discovery: but Moses could not have made the discovery, knowing nothing of the higher departments of science; therefore, the account came from the only Being who could rationally be supposed to know anything about the beginning of the world. 'Either,' said the _New York Sun_, speaking of a mathematical problem discussed in the article, 'that problem was predicated by us or some other person, who has thereby made the greatest of all modern discoveries in mathematical astronomy. We did not make it, for we know nothing of mathematics whatever; therefore, it was made by the only person to whom it can rationally be ascribed, namely Herschel the astronomer, its only avowed and undeniable author.' In reality, notwithstanding this convincing argument, the problem was stolen by Locke from a paper by Olbers, shortly before published, and gave the method followed by Beer and Madler throughout their selenographical researches in 1833-37.

[50] I had at the same time the good fortune to satisfy in equal degree, though quite unexpectedly, an English student of the sun, who at that time bore me no great good-will. Something in the article chanced to suggest that it came from another, presumably a rival, hand; while an essay which appeared about the same time (the spring of 1872) was commonly but erroneously attributed to me. Accordingly, a leading article in _Nature_ was devoted to the annihilation of the writer supposed to be myself, and to the lavish and quite undeserved laudation of the article I had written, which was selected as typifying all the good qualities which an article of the kind should possess. Those acquainted with the facts were not a little amused by the mistake.

[51] The Astronomer-Royal once told me that he had found that few persons have a clear conception of the fact that the stars rise and set.

Still fewer know how the stars move, which stars rise and set, which are always above the horizon, which move on large circles, which on small ones; though a few hours' observation on half-a-dozen nights in the year (such observations being continuous, but made only at hourly intervals) would show dearly how the stars move. It is odd to find even some who write about astronomy making mistakes on matters so elementary. For instance, in a primer of astronomy recently published, it is stated that the stars which pa.s.s overhead in London rise and set on a slant--the real fact being that _those_ stars never rise or set at all, never coming within some two dozen moon-breadths of the horizon.

[52] In pa.s.sing let me note that, of course, I am not discussing the arguments of paradoxists with the remotest idea of disproving them. They are not, in reality, worth the trouble. But they show where the general reader of astronomical text-books, and other such works, is likely to go astray, and thus conveniently indicate matters whose explanation may be useful or interesting.

[53] Sterne antic.i.p.ated this paradoxist in (jestingly) attributing gla.s.siness to an inferior planet. He made the inhabitants, however, not the air, gla.s.sy. 'The intense heat of the country,' he says, speaking of the planet Mercury, 'must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants to suit them for the climate; so that all the tenements of their souls may be nothing else, for aught the soundest philosophy can show to the contrary, but one fine transparent body of clear gla.s.s; so that till the inhabitant grows old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light become monstrously refracted, or return reflected from the surface, etc., his soul might as well play the fool out o' doors as in her own house.'

[54] It will be seen from Table X. of my treatise on Saturn that the ring disappeared on December 12, remaining invisible (because turning its dark side earthwards) till the spring of 1613. But on December 4, the ring must have been quite invisible in a telescope so feeble as Galileo's. The ring then would have been little more than a fine line of light as seen with one of our powerful modern telescopes.

[55] _North British Review_ for August 1860.

[56] He had, indeed, at an earlier stage, shown a marvellous ignorance of astronomy by the remark, which doubtless appeared to him a safe one, that when he saw a planet on the sun in September he supposed it was Mercury; a September transit of Mercury being as impossible as an eclipse of the sun during the moon's third quarter.

[57] It is, by the way, somewhat amusing to find Baron Humboldt referring a question of this sort to the great mathematician Gauss, and describing the problem as though it involved the most profound calculations. Ten minutes should suffice to deal with any problem of the kind.