Flowers of the Sky — Richard A. Proctor
Proctor. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Flowers of the Sky Author : Richard A. Proctor Release date : December 6, 2017 [eBook #56133] Most recently updated: October 23, 2024 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56133 Credits : Produced by Chris Curnow, Christopher Wright and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF PROCTOR AUTHOR OF "THE EXPANSE OF HEAVEN," "THE INFINITIES AROUND US," "THE UNIVERSE OF STARS," "THE SUN," "THE MOON," ETC., ETC. WITH FIFTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS New York A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 714, BROADWAY All rights reserved Proctor. "Spirit of nature! here, In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple. Yet not the lightest leaf That quivers to the passing breeze Is less instinct with thee."— Shelley. Proctor. CONTENTS. PAGE I. LIGHT 1 II. SPACE 17 III. THE INFINITELY MINUTE 31 IV. THE MYSTERY OF GRAVITY 43 V. THE END OF MANY WORLDS 56 VI. THE AURORA BOREALIS 91 VII. THE LUNAR HALO 114 VIII. MOONLIGHT 125 IX. THE PLANET MARS 149 X. THE PLANET JUPITER 191 XI. THE RINGED PLANET SATURN 215 XII. FANCIED FIGURES AMONG THE STARS 236 XIII. TRANSITS OF VENUS 273 Proctor. I. LIGHT. "What soul was his, when, from the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked— Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy." We live in a mighty ocean whose waves are ever rushing hither and thither, always according to law, with velocity inconceivable, almost immeasurable. These waves lave the shore of that island of space which is our home, travelling to it from remotest regions, and making known to us all that we know of what lies outside our small abode. We call these waves, or rather their effects, by the name of Light. We recognise in light— "offspring of Heav'n's first-born And of th' Eternal co-eternal beam"— the antecedent of all else that exists in the universe; or, as Sir John Herschel said, "the superior in point of rank and conception to all other products or results of creative power in the physical world. It is light which alone can give, and does give us, the assurance of a uniform and all-pervading energy—a mechanism almost beyond conception, complex, minute, and powerful, by which that influence, or rather that movement, is propagated. Our evidence of the existence of gravitation fails us beyond the region of the double stars, or leaves at best only a presumption amounting to moral conviction in its favour. But the argument for a unity of design and action afforded by light stands unweakened by distance, and is co-extensive with the universe itself." What, then, is light? What is that mysterious movement of some essence pervading all space, whereby, from remotest depths, news is brought to us, after journeys lasting many years, though space is traversed at a rate exceeding more than ten million times the velocity of the swiftest express train? Light is in reality the result of undulations in what is called the ether of space, a perfectly transparent, almost perfectly elastic medium, occupying not only void space, but flowing as freely through the densest solids as the summer breeze flows through the forest trees. The waves of light cannot in this way pass through solid or liquid, or even aerial bodies, but either they are sooner or later brought to rest, or else they are more or less gradually deflected; just as the waves which traverse the ocean come to their end, or are deflected, when they meet the shore or shallows near the shore. All light, however, has its real origin, not in the ethereal ocean itself, but in the movements of the minute particles of which all forms of matter known to us are composed. A tiny atom, far too small to be perceived with a microscope, even though one should be made ten thousand times more powerful than any yet constructed, when set in rapid vibration, raises minute waves in the ethereal ocean, just as a small body, vibrating on the surface of a sheet of water, would generate waves there. And as the water-waves would travel radially away from the place of their birth, so do the light-waves generated by the vibrations of one of the atoms composing a luminous body radiate forth in all directions through the ethereal ocean until, encountering some obstacle, they are sent (reduced in size) in a new direction. In some luminous bodies there are atoms vibrating in many different periods (all very small) so as to cause light-waves of many different kinds to proceed from the body. In other cases the atoms all vibrate at one rate, or at two or three or some definite number of rates, so that only light-waves of certain kinds proceed from the body. But in all cases these light-waves only cause us to see the body when they flow in through the pupil of the eye, and falling upon the retina (or the choroid membrane, or whatever part of the eye it may be which finally receives the waves), convey to the optic nerve, and thence to the brain, the information that such and such a body, so coloured, so shaped, so moving, exists towards that direction from which the light-waves seem to come. The body so seen , as we call it, may be the original source of light, or may be a body on which light has been reflected to us. It is in this way that we receive information from light-waves. It will be conceived how minute they must be, how perfectly they must retain their separate character, multitudinous though they are, in traversing the ether (even when that ether is clogged by