THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 219 
Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of 
mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks 
in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, 
or Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see 
how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest 
dreams of the poets are eclipsed. 
The vibratory theory of light and its identity with 
the laws of sound, the laws of the tides and the sea-— 
sons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the theory of 
gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the 
deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within 
world of the microscope, etc., —in these and many 
other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scien- 
tist or the poet we are listening to. What greater 
magic than that you can take a colorless ray of 
light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen 
all the divine hues of the rainbow ? 
In some respects science has but followed out and 
confirmed the dim foreshadowings of the human 
breast. Man in his simplicity has called the sun 
father and the earth mother. Science shows this to 
be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really chil- 
dren of the sun, and that every heart-beat, every 
pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The 
power with which you now move and breathe came 
from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in 
your pocket came from the bank. 
The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the 
shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a 
turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle. 
An acute person says that science has but changed 
