Chapter III: Part 3

Numerous as are the heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye, and glorious as are their manifestations, it is probable that in our own system there are great numbers as yet undiscovered. Just two hundred years ago this year, Huyghens announced the discovery of one satellite of Saturn, and expressed the opinion that the six planets and six satellites then known, and making up the perfect number of _twelve_, composed the whole of our planetary system. In 1729 an astronomical writer expressed the opinion that there might be other bodies in our system, but that the limit of telescopic power had been reached, and no further discoveries were likely to be made.[A] The orbit of one comet only had been definitively calculated. Since that time the power of the telescope has been indefinitely increased; two primary planets of the first class, ten satellites, and forty-three small planets revolving between Mars and Jupiter, have been discovered, the orbits of six or seven hundred comets, some of brief period, have been ascertained;--and it has been computed, that hundreds of thousands of these mysterious bodies wander through our system. There is no reason to think that all the primary planets, which revolve about the sun, have been discovered. An indefinite increase in the number of asteroids may be anticipated; while outside of Neptune, between our sun and the nearest fixed star, supposing the attraction of the sun to prevail through half the distance, there is room for ten more primary planets succeeding each other at distances increasing in a geometrical ratio. The first of these will, unquestionably, be discovered as soon as the perturbations of Neptune shall have been accurately observed; and with maps of the heavens, on which the smallest telescopic stars are laid down, it may be discovered much sooner.

[Footnote A: _Memoirs of A.A.S._, vol. iii, 275.]

THE VASTNESS OF CREATION.

But it is when we turn our observation and our thoughts from our own system, to the systems which lie beyond it in the heavenly spaces, that we approach a more adequate conception of the vastness of creation. All analogy teaches us that the sun which gives light to us is but one of those countless stellar fires which deck the firmament, and that every glittering star in that shining host is the center of a system as vast and as full of subordinate luminaries as our own. Of these suns--centers of planetary systems--thousands are visible to the naked eye, millions are discovered by the telescope. Sir John Herschell, in the account of his operations at the Cape of Good Hope (p. 381) calculates that about five and a half millions of stars are visible enough to be _distinctly counted_ in a twenty-foot reflector, in both hemispheres. He adds, that "the actual number is much greater, there can be little doubt." His illustrious father, estimated on one occasion that 125,000 stars passed through the field of his forty foot reflector in a quarter of an hour. This would give 12,000,000 for the entire circuit of the heavens, in a single telescopic zone; and this estimate was made under the assumption that the nebulæ were masses of luminous matter not yet condensed into suns.

These stupendous calculations, however, form but the first column of the inventory of the universe. Faint white specks are visible, even to the naked eye of a practiced observer in different parts of the heavens. Under high magnifying powers, several thousands of such spots are visible,--no longer however, faint, white specks, but many of them resolved by powerful telescopes into vast aggregations of stars, each of which may, with propriety, be compared with the milky way. Many of these nebulæ, however, resisted the power of Sir Wm. Herschell's great reflector, and were, accordingly, still regarded by him as masses of unformed matter, not yet condensed into suns. This, till a few years since, was, perhaps, the prevailing opinion; and the nebular theory filled a large space in modern astronomical science. But with the increase of instrumental power, especially under the mighty grasp of Lord Rosse's gigantic reflector, and the great refractors at Pulkova and Cambridge, the most irresolvable of these nebulæ have given way; and the better opinion now is, that every one of them is a galaxy, like our own milky way, composed of millions of suns. In other words, we are brought to the bewildering conclusion that thousands of these misty specks, the greater part of them too faint to be seen with the naked eye, are, not each a universe like our solar system, but each a "swarm" of universes of unappreciable magnitude.[A] The mind sinks, overpowered by the contemplation. We repeat the words, but they no longer convey distinct ideas to the understanding.

[Footnote A: Humboldt's _Cosmos_, iii. 41.]

CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE.

But these conclusions, however vast their comprehension, carry us but another step forward in the realms of sidereal astronomy. A proper motion in space of our sun, and of the fixed stars as we call them, has long been believed to exist. Their vast distances only prevent its being more apparent. The great improvement of instruments of measurement within the last generation has not only established the existence of this motion, but has pointed to the region in the starry vault around which our whole solar and stellar system, with its myriad of attendant planetary worlds, appears to be performing a mighty revolution. If, then, we assume that outside of the system to which we belong and in which our sun is but a star like Aldebaran or Sirius, the different nebulæ of which we have spoken,--thousands of which spot the heavens--constitute a distinct family of universes, we must, following the guide of analogy, attribute to each of them also, beyond all the revolutions of their individual attendant planetary systems, a great revolution, comprehending the whole; while the same course of analogical reasoning would lead us still further onward, and in the last analysis, require us to assume a transcendental connection between all these mighty systems--a universe of universes, circling round in the infinity of space, and preserving its equilibrium by the same laws of mutual attraction which bind the lower worlds together.

It may be thought that conceptions like these are calculated rather to depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy vesture of decay," is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than the brightest sun that lights the depths of heaven. The organized human eye, instinct with life and soul, which, gazing through the telescope, travels up to the cloudy speck in the handle of Orion's sword, and bids it blaze forth into a galaxy as vast as ours, stands higher in the order of being than all that host of luminaries. The intellect of Newton which discovered the law that holds the revolving worlds together, is a nobler work of God than a universe of universes of unthinking matter.

If, still treading the loftiest paths of analogy, we adopt the supposition,--to me I own the grateful supposition,--that the countless planetary worlds which attend these countless suns, are the abodes of rational beings like man, instead of bringing back from this exalted conception a feeling of insignificance, as if the individuals of our race were but poor atoms in the infinity of being, I regard it, on the contrary, as a glory of our human nature, that it belongs to a family which no man can number of rational natures like itself. In the order of being they may stand beneath us, or they may stand above us; _he_ may well be content with his place, who is made "a little lower than the angels."

CONTEMPLATION OF THE HEAVENS.

Finally, my Friends, I believe there is no contemplation better adapted to awaken devout ideas than that of the heavenly bodies,--no branch of natural science which bears clearer testimony to the power and wisdom of God than that to which you this day consecrate a temple. The heart of the ancient world, with all the prevailing ignorance of the true nature and motions of the heavenly orbs, was religiously impressed by their survey. There is a passage in one of those admirable philosophical treatises of Cicero composed in the decline of life, as a solace under domestic bereavement and patriotic concern at the impending convulsions of the state, in which, quoting from some lost work of Aristotle, he treats the topic in a manner which almost puts to shame the teachings of Christian wisdom.

"Præclare ergo Aristoteles, 'Si essent,' inquit, 'qui sub terra semper habitavissent, bonis et illustribus domiciliis quæ essent ornata signis atque picturis, instructaque rebus iis omnibus quibus abundant ii qui beati putantur, nec tamen exissent unquam supra terram; accepissent autem fama et auditione, esse quoddam numen et vim Deorum,--deinde aliquo tempore patefactis terræ faucibus ex illis abditis sedibus evadere in hæc loca quæ nos incolimus, atque exire potuissent; cum repente terram et maria coelumque, vidissent; nubium magnitudinem ventorumque vim, cognovissent; aspexissentque solem, ejusque tum magnitudinem, pulchritudinemque; tum etiam efficientiam cognovissent, quod is diem efficeret, toto coelo luce diffusa; cum autem terras nox opacasset, tum coelum totum cernerent astris distinctum et ornatum, lunæque luminum varietatem tum crescentis tum senescentis, corumque omnium ortus et occasus atque in æternitate ratos immutabilesque cursus;--hæc cum viderent, profecto et esse Deos, et hæc tanta opera Deorum esse, arbitrarentur."[A]

There is much by day to engage the attention of the Observatory; the sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disc (to us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the inferior planets, the mysteries of the spectrum;--all phenomena of vast importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time; he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men disappear; but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yes, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plow passes over the site of mighty cities,--the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love, which placed them in the heavens and uphold them there.

[Footnote A: "Nobly does Aristotle observe, that if there were beings who had always lived under ground, in convenient, nay, in magnificent dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and every thing which belongs to prosperous life, but who had never come above ground; who had heard, however, by fame and report, of the being and power of the gods; if, at a certain time, the portals of the earth being thrown open, they had been able to emerge from those hidden abodes to the regions inhabited by us; when suddenly they had seen the earth, the sea, and the sky; had perceived the vastness of the clouds and the force of the winds; had contemplated the sun, his magnitude and his beauty, and still more his effectual power, that it is he who makes the day, by the diffusion of his light through the whole sky; and, when night had darkened the earth, should then behold the whole heavens studded and adorned with stars, and the various lights of the waxing and waning moon, the risings and the settings of all these heavenly bodies, and the courses fixed and immutable in all eternity; when, I say, they should see these things, truly they would believe that there were gods, and these so great things are their works."--Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_ lib. ii., § 30.]