The Wonder of the World 43 



But does the modern school-boy's heart leap up ? 

 His Physiology lessons have taught him to regard 

 with extreme disfavour any such interference with 

 the normal function of the vagus nerve; and, be- 

 sides, his Physics lessons have explained away the 

 rainbow. One remembers how Keats in his wrath 

 cursed Newton for his share in robbing mankind 

 of the wonder of the rainbow. What can one say 

 except this, that the beauty of the rainbow is the 

 same to-day as it was in the days oi Noah, and 

 that if we follow up the scientific interpretation 

 of the rainbow, we come in sight of even greater 

 wonders. When the half-gods go, the Gods ar- 

 rive. 



We watch the midnight sky flushed with the 

 quivering Northern Lights — pale green and rose, 

 crimson and gold — pulsating like the pinions of a 

 hovering bird, and we wonder. We are at first 

 saddened by our friend's remark that it is an inter- 

 esting electro-magnetic phenomenon. But when 

 we ask for details, and he tells us that corpuscles 

 projected from the sun and bombarding the earth 

 are affected by terrestrial magnetism, and travel 

 in spiral coils toward the poles, till at a certain 

 distance they exhaust themselves in giving off 

 cathode rays, and so on, we begin to feel that we 

 did not well to be sad. As we follow up the sci- 

 entific unravelling of the mystery of the Aurora 

 Borealis, we find that the world is even grander 



