And when high noon on many a sail Was bright along the brimming dow, Or when the westering sun must fail Blood-red, and from the shifting glow green, One lesson still my spirit learned yearned Ere we can find true peace again, Our being must have second birth, Purged and made one through toil and pain With Him Who rules and rounds the earth, Beyond the dark, behind the light, In mystery of the Infinite. And we like rivers from their source Through cloud and shine, by deep or shoal, Must follow that which draws our course, The Love that is its guide and goal; Of life, of death ye made me free, Waters and hills of Severn Sea! HERBERT WARREN. RATAPLAN. "O Rataplan! It is a merry note, And mother, I'm for 'listing in the morn:" "And would ye, son, to wear a scarlet coat, Go leave your mother's latter age forlorn?" "O mother, I am sick of sheep and goat, Fat cattle, and the reaping of the corn: I long to see the British colors float: For glory, glory, glory, was I born." She saw him march. It was a gallant sight. She blest herself, and praised him for a man. And straight he hurried to the bitter fight, And found a bullet in the drear Soudan. They dug a shallow grave-'twas all they might: And that's the end of glory. Rataplan! April, 1891. EDWARD CRA CROFT LEFROY. THE NEW From The Nineteenth Century. ASTRONOMY: A PERSONAL RETROSPECT. While progress in all branches of knowledge has been rapid beyond precedent during the past sixty years, in at least two directions this knowledge has been so unexpected and novel in character that two new sciences may be said to have arisen: the new medicine, with which the names of Lister and of Pasteur will remain associated; and the new astronomy, of the birth and early growth of which I have now to speak. The new astronomy, unlike the old astronomy to which we are indebted for skill in the navigation of the seas, the calculation of the tides, and the daily regulation of time, can lay no claim to afford us material help in the routine of daily life. Her sphere lies outside the earth. Is she less fair? Shall we pay her less court because it is to mental culture in its highest form, to our purely intellectual joys that she contributes? For surely in no part of nature are the noblest and most profound conceptions of the human spirit more directly called forth than in the study of the heavens and the host thereof. .. may lift themselves up hyer. May we not rather greet her in the words of Horace: "O matre pulchra filia pulchrior"? As it fell to my lot to have some part in the early development of this new science, it has been suggested to me that the present Jubilee year of retrospect would be a suitable occasion to give some account of its history from the standpoint of my own work. Before I begin the narrative of my personal observations, it is desirable that I should give a short statement of the circumstances which led up to the birth of the new science in 1859, and also say a few words of the state of scientific opinion about the matters of which it treats, just before that time. It is not easy for men of the present generation, familiar with the knowl edge which the new methods of research of which I am about to speak have revealed to us, to put themselves back a generation, into the position of the scientific thought which existed on these subjects in the early years of the queen's reign. At that time any knowledge of the chemical nature and of the physics of the heavenly bodies was regarded as not only impossible of attainment by any methods of direct observation, but as, indeed, lying altogether outside the limitations imposed upon man by his senses, and by the fixity of his position upon the earth. It could never be, it was confidently thought, more than a matter of presumption, whether even the matter of the sun, and much less that of the stars, were of the same nature as that of the earth, and the unceasing energy radiated from it due to such matter at a high temperature. The nebular hypothesis of Laplace at the end of the last century required, indeed, that matter similar to that of the earth should exist throughout the solar system; but then this hypothesis itself needed for its full confirmation the independent and direct observation that the solar matter was terrestrial in its nature. This theoretical probability in the case of the sun vanished almost into thin air when the attempt was made to extend it to the stellar hosts; for it might well be urged that in those immensely distant regions an original difference of the primordial stuff as well as other conditions of condensation were present, giving rise to groups of substances which have but little analogy with those of our earthly chemistry. About the time of the queen's accession to the throne the French philosopher Comte put very clearly in his "Cours de Philosophie Positive" the views then held, of the impossibility of direct observations of the chemical nature of the heavenly bodies. He says: On conçoit en effet, que nous puissions conjecturer, avec quelque espoir de succès, sur la formation du système solaire dont nous faisons partie, car il nous présente de nombreux phénomènes parfaitement connus, susceptibles peut-être de porter un témoignage décisif de sa véritable origine immédiate. Mais quelle pourrait être, au contraire, la base rationnelle de nos conjectures sur la formation des soleils eux-mêmes? Comment confirmer ou infirmer à ce sujet, d'apres les phénomènes, aucune hypothèse cosmogonique, lorsqu'il n'existe vraiment en ce genre aucum phénomène exploré, ni même, sans doute, EXPLORABLE? [The capitals are mine.] We could never know for certain, it All sow'd with glistering stars more thicke For how could we extend the methods of the laboratory to bodies at distances so great that even the imagination fails to realize them? The only communication from them which reaches us across the gulf of space is the light which tells us of their existence. Fortunately this light is not so simple in its nature as it seems to be to the unaided eye. In reality it is very complex; like a cable of many strands, it is made up of light rays of many kinds. Let this light-cable pass from air obliquely through a piece of glass, and its separate strand-rays all go astray, each turning its own way, and then go on apart. Make the glass into the shape of a wedge or prism, and the rays are twice widely scattered. First the flaming red Sprung vivid forth: the tawny orange next; And next delicious yellow; by whose side green. Then the pure blue, that swells autumnal Ethereal played; and then, of sadder hue, While the last gleamings of refracted light Within this unravelled starlight exists rays may be blotted out, others may be enhanced in brilliancy. These differences, countless in variety, form a code of signals, in which is conveyed to us, when once we have made out the cipher in which it is written, information of the chemical nature of the celestial gases by which the different light rays have been blotted out, or by which they have been enhanced. In the hands of the astronomer a prism has now become more potent in revealing the unknown than even was said to be "Agrippa's magic glass." It was the discovery of this code of signals, and of its interpretation, which made possible the rise of the new astronomy. We must glance, but very briefly, at some of the chief steps in the progress of events which slowly led up to this discovery. Newton, in his classical work upon the solar spectrum, failed, through some strange fatality, to discover the narrow gaps wanting in light, which, as dark lines, cross the colors of the spectrum and constitute the code of symbols. His failure is often put down to his using a round hole in place of a narrow slit, through the overlapping of the images of which the dark lines failed to show themselves. Though Newton did use a round hole, he states distinctly in his "Optics" that later he adopted a narrow opening in the form of a long parallelogram—that is, a true slit-at first one-tenth of an inch in width, then only one-twentieth of an inch, and at last still narrower. These conditions under which Newton worked were such as should have shown him the dark lines upon his screen. Professor Johnson has recently repeated Newton's experiments under strictly similar conditions, with the result that the chief dark lines were well seen. For some reason Newton failed to discover them. A possible cause may have been the bad annealing of his prism, though he says that it was made of good glass and free from bubbles. The dark lines were described first by Wollaston in 1792, who strangely associated them with the boundaries of the spectral colors, and so turned contem porary thought away from the direction in which lay their true significance. It was left to Fraunhofer in 1815, by whose name the dark lines are still known, not only to map some six hundred of them, but also to discover similar lines, but differently arranged, in several stars. Further, he found that a pair of dark lines in the solar spectrum appeared to correspond in their position in the spectrum, and in their distance from each other, to a pair of bright lines which were nearly always present in terrestrial flames. This last observation contained the key to the interpretation of the dark lines as a code of symbols; but Fraunhofer failed to use it; and the birth of astrophysics was delayed. An observation by Forbes at the eclipse of 1836 led thought away from the suggestive experiments of Fraunhofer; so that in the very year of the queen's accession the knowledge of the time had to be summed up by Mrs. Somerville in the negation: "We are still ignorant of the cause of these rayless bands." Later on, the revelation came more or less fully to many minds. Foucault, Balfour Stewart, Angström prepared the way. Prophetic guesses were made by Stokes and by Lord Kelvin. But it was Kirchhoff who, in 1859, first fully developed the true significance of the dark lines; and by his joint work with Bunsen on the solar spectrum proved beyond all question that the dark lines in the spectrum of the sun are produced by the absorption of the vapors of the same substances, which when suitably heated give out corresponding bright lines; and, further, that many of the solar absorbing vapors are those of substances found upon the earth. The new astronomy was born. At the time that I purchased my present house, Tulse Hill was much more than now in the country and away from the smoke of London. It was after a little hesitation that I decided to give my chief attention to observational astronomy, for I was strongly under the spell of the rapid discoveries then taking place in microscopical research in connection with physiology. In 1856 I built a convenient observatory opening by a passage from the house, and raised so as to command an uninterrupted view of the sky except on the north side. It consisted of a dome twelve feet in diameter and a transit room. There was erected in it an equatorially mounted telescope by Dollond of five inches aperture, at that time looked upon as a large rather than a small instrument. I commenced work on the usual lines, taking transits, observing and making drawings of planets. Some of Jupiter now lying before me, I venture to think, would not compare unfavorably with drawings made with the larger instruments of the present day. About that time Mr. Alvan Clark, the founder of the American firm famous for the construction of the great objectglasses of the Lick and the Yerkes Observatories, then a portrait-painter by profession, began, as an amateur, to make object-glasses of large size for that time, and of very great merit. Specimens of his earliest work came into the hands of my friend Mr. Dawes and received the high approval of that distinguished judge. In 1858 I purchased from Mr. Dawes an object-glass by Alvan Clark of eight inches diameter, which he parted with to make room for a lens of a larger diameter by a quarter of an inch, which Mr. Clark had undertaken to make for him. I paid the price that it had cost Mr. Dawes-namely, 2001. This telescope was mounted for me equatorially and provided with a clock motion by Mr. Cooke of York. I soon became a little dissatisfied with the routine character of ordinary astronomical work, and in a vague way sought about in my mind for the possibility of research upon the heavens in a new direction or by new methods. It was just at this time, when a vague longing after newer methods of observation for attacking many of the problems of the heavenly bodies filled my mind, that the news reached me of Kirchhoff's great discovery of the true nature and the chemical constitution of the sun from his interpretation of the Fraunhofer lines. This news was to me like the coming upon a spring of water in a dry and thirsty land. Here at last presented itself the very order of work for which in an indefinite way I was lookingnamely, to extend his novel methods of research upon the sun to the other heavenly bodies. A feeling as of inspiration seized me: I felt as if I had it now in my power to lift a veil which had never before been lifted; as if a key had been put into my hands which would unlock a door which had been regarded as forever closed to man-the veil and door behind which lay the unknown mystery of the true nature of the heavenly bodies. This was especially work for which I was to a great extent prepared, from being already familiar with the chief methods of chemical and physical research. It was just at this time that I happened to meet at a soirée of the Pharmaceutical Society, where spectroscopes were shown, my friend and neighbor, Dr. W. Allen Miller, professor of chemistry at King's College, who had already worked much on chemical spectroscopy. A sudden impulse seized me to suggest to him that we should return home together. On our way home I told him of what was in my mind, and asked him to join me in the attempt I was about to make, to apply Kirchhoff's methods to the stars. At first, from considerations of the great relative faintness of the stars, and the great delicacy of the work from the earth's motion, even with the aid of a clockwork, he hesitated as to the probability of our success. Finally he agreed to come to my observatory on the first fine evening, for some preliminary experiments as to what we might expect to do upon the stars. before us. It is difficult for any one, who has now only to give an order for a star spectroscope, to understand in any true degree the difficulties which we met with in attempting to make such observations for the first time. From the sun with which the Heidelberg professors had to do—which, even bright as it is, for some parts of the spectrum has no light to spare to the brightest stars is a very far cry. The light received at the earth from a first magnitude star, as Vega, is only about the one forty thousand millionth part of that received from the sun. Fortunately, as the stars are too far off to show a true disk, it is possible to concentrate all the light received from the star upon a large mirror or objectglass, into the telescopic image, and so increase its brightness. We could not make use of the easy method adopted by Fraunhofer of placing a prism before the object-glass, for we needed a terrestrial spectrum, taken under the same conditions, for the interpretation, by a simultaneous comparison with it of the star's spectrum. Kirchhoff's method required that the image of a star should be thrown upon a narrow slit simultaneously with the light from a flame or from an electric spark. These conditions made it necessary to attach a spectroscope to the eye-end of the telescope, so that it would be carried with it, with its slit in the focal plane. Then, by means of a small reflecting prism placed before one half of the slit, light from a terrestrial source at the side of the telescope could be sent into the instrument together with the star's light, and so form a spectrum by the side of the stellar spectrum, for convenient comparison with it. At that time a star spectroscope was This was not all. As the telescopic an instrument unknown to the optician. image of a star is a point, its spectrum I remember that for our first trials we will be a narrow line of light without had one of the hollow prisms filled with appreciable breadth. Now for the obbisulphide of carbon so much in use servation of either dark or of bright then, and which in consequence of a lines across the spectrum a certain small leak smelt abominably. To this breadth is absolutely needful. To get day this pungent odor reminds me of breadth, the pointlike image of the star star spectra! must be broadened out. As light is of Let us look at the problem which lay first importance, it was desirable to |