CELESTIAL CHEMISTRY. 383 



Dut when asked what that one far off event is to which the 

 whole creation moves, science is silent. The spectroscope has 

 shown us that, although we are separated from some of the 

 stars by distances so vast that the light which flashes in a few 

 seconds across the 93 million miles separating us from our sun, 

 would take several thousands of years to traverse those 

 distances, yet between us and those distant stars there is after 

 all a fundamental unity of constitution. The materials of which 

 worlds are eventually formed, Sir Norman Lockyer has told us, 

 are similar /'/; (/// parts of space : not only do they contain the 

 same elcincnts, but they contain them in absolutely identical 

 proportions. This implies that our whole universe, and the 

 unimagined universes beyond, are all controlled by the same 

 laws, all fashioned on the same plan; or, to quote Sir David 

 Gill once more, the stars are 



"*' alike in design, alike in chemical constitution, alike in process of develop- 

 ment." 



" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 

 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." 



That is the conclusion whither science, followed without 

 prejudice, irresistibly leads; a conclusion, I need hardly add, 

 that is nevertheless tmspeakably far from warranting anything 

 of the nature of pantheism or of monism. 



The spectroscope should serve as a perpetual warning against 

 scientific dogmatism. Science, according to our conception of 

 it. cannot be absolutely permanent and final. As I said in my 

 Presidential Address to the Cape Chemical Society last year, 

 the fundamentals of chemistry are re-stated on an average once 

 a century. Not a century ago one of the world's most 

 prominent pliilosophers declared expressly that a knowledge of 

 the chemical composition of the heavenly bodies could never 

 be attained, for we could have no means of chemically 

 examining the materials of which they are constituted. The 

 day of such emphatic assertion is — or should be — past. Thanks 

 to a little solid triangle of glass we need no longer to say : — 

 " Twinkle, twinkle, little star ; 

 How I wonder what you are !" 



By means in the first instance of that little glass prism and 

 subsequently of the diffraction grating, we have inconceivably 

 increased our knowledge of celestial chemistry, but the very 

 knowledge that we have thus gained has enabled us dimly to 

 realise the unfathomable vastness of the yet imknown 

 mysteries of space; and thus is aroused a wonder far trans- 

 cending that of the old nursery rhyme. We have learnt much, 

 but the sum total of our knowledge becomes ludicrously 

 insignificant when contrasted with our colossal ignorance. 

 As a recent astronomical writer says, our knowledge will 

 appear the merest ignorance to those who come after us : we 

 still stand like Newton, looking for glistening pebbles along 

 the shore, while before us stretches the wide ocean of truth 

 practically unexplored ; for we have been only wading in the 

 shallows, and what we have discovered there prompts us to 

 re-echo the enquiry of the wise man of old — with an intensitv 

 of wonderment that he could never have reached — 

 " THAT WHICH IS FAR OFF AND EXCEEDING DEEP, WHO CAN 

 FIND IT OUT ? " 



