Photography of the Skies 



those which still rotate around the central ball of 

 Saturn. Professor George H. Darwin says that 

 a meteoric swarm, seen from the distance of the 

 stars, would behave like a mass composed of con- 

 tinuous gas. 



The triumphs of light in the astronomical 

 camera but reaffirm the solidarity of nature, tes- 

 tifying once more that any new thread caught 

 from her skein leads the explorer not only through 

 labyrinths which puzzled him of old, but to new 

 heavens otherwise hidden for all time. Nothing 

 within human knowledge is more marvellous 

 than the agency, apparently so simple, concerned 

 in all this. A ray of light, infinitesimal in energy, 

 persists on its way, for years it may be, through 

 the whole radius of the universe, un tired, tin- 

 tolled; its undulations, intricate beyond full por- 

 trayal, arrive with an unconfused story of the 

 physical consistence and chemical nature of their 

 source, of the atmosphere that waylaid them, of 

 the direction in which, and the rate at which, 

 their parent orb was spinning or flying when 

 the ray set out for the earth. 



To i.xen of old who knew only what had be- 

 fallen themselves and their dwelling-place during 

 a few generations, it was but natural to repeat: 

 "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall 

 be: and that which is done is that which shall be 

 done: and there is no new thing under the sun. "* 

 But we of to-day are in a different case. The 

 astronomer joining camera to telescope brings 



* Ecclesiastes I, 9. 



101 



