DBIFTIXG LIGHT-WAVES. 



315 



ing our own consensus within. The whole set 

 of positive thoughts compels us to believe that it 

 is an infinite apathy to which your heaven would 

 consign us, without objects, without relations, 

 without change, without growth, without action, 

 an absolute nothingness, a nirvdna of impotence 

 — this is not life ; it is not consciousness ; it is 

 not happiness. So far as we can grasp the hy- 

 pothesis, it seems equally ludicrous and repulsive. 

 You may call it paradise ; but we call it con- 

 scious annihilation. You may long for it, if you 

 have been so taught ; just as if you had been 

 taught to cherish such hopes, you might be now 

 yearning for the moment when you might become 

 the immaterial principle of a comet, or as you 

 might tell me that you really were the ether, and 

 were about to take your place in space. This is 

 how these sublimities affect us. But we know 

 that to many this future is one of spiritual de- 

 velopment, a life of growth and continual up- 

 soaring of still higher affection. It may be so ; 

 but to our mind these are contradictions in 

 terms. We cannot understand what life and 

 affection can mean, where you postulate the ab- 

 sence of every condition by which life and affec- 

 tion are possible. Can there be development 



where there is no law, thought or affection where 

 object and subject are confused into one essence ? 

 How can that be existence, where everything of 

 which we have experience, and everything which 

 we can define, is presumed to be unable to enter? 

 To us these things are all incoherences ; and in 

 the midst of practical realities and the solid 

 duties of life, sheer impertinences. The field is 

 full; each human life has a perfectly real and a 

 vast future to look forward to ; these hyperbolic 

 enigmas disturb our grave duties and our solid 

 hopes. No wonder, then, while they are still so 

 rife, that men are dull to the moral responsibility 

 which, in its awfulness, begins only at the grave; 

 that they are so little influenced by the futurity 

 which will judge them ; that they are blind to 

 the dignity and beauty of death, and shuffle off 

 the dead life and the dead body with such cruel 

 disrespect. The fumes of the celestial immor- 

 tality still confuse them. It is only when an 

 earthly future is the fulfillment of a worthy earth- 

 ly life, that we can see all the majesty as well as 

 the glory of the world beyond the grave ; and 

 then only will it fulfill its moral and religious pur- 

 pose as the great guide of human conduct. — 

 Nineteenth Century. 



DEIFTING LIGHT-WAVES. 



Br EICHAED A. PEOCTOE, B. A. 



TEE method of measuring the motion of very 

 swiftly-traveliug bodies by noting changes 

 in the light-waves which reach us from them, one 

 of the most remarkable methods of observation 

 ever yet devised by man, has recently been placed 

 upon its trial, so to speak, with results exceed- 

 ingly satisfactory to the students of science who 

 had accepted the facts established by it. The 

 method will not be unfamiliar to many readers of 

 these pages. The principle involved was first 

 noted by M. Doppler, but not in a form which 

 promised any useful results. The method actu- 

 ally applied appears to have occurred simul- 

 taneously to several persons, as well theorists as 

 observers. Thus Secchi claimed in March, 1868, 

 to have applied it, though unsuccessfully ; Hug- 

 gins, in April, 1808, described his successful use 

 of the method. I, myself, wholly unaware that 

 either of these observers was endeavoring to 

 measure celestial motions by its means, described 

 the method, in words which I shall presently 



quote, in the number of Fraser's Magazine for 

 January, 1868, two months before the earliest 

 enunciation of its nature by the physicists just 

 named. 



It will be well briefly to describe the principle 

 of this interesting method, before considering the 

 attack to which it has been recently subjected, 

 and its triumphant acquittal from defects charged 

 against it. This brief description will not only 

 be useful to those readers who chance not to be 

 acquainted with the method, but may serve to 

 remove objections which suggest themselves, I 

 notice, to many who have had the principle of the 

 method imperfectly explained to them. 



Light travels from every self-luminous body 

 in waves which sweep through the ether of space 

 at the rate of 185,000 miles per second. As I 

 have elsewhere pointed out, " the whole of that 

 region of space over which astronomers have 

 extended their survey, and, doubtless, a region 

 many millions of millions of times more extended, 



