130 Transactions of the American Institute, 



who first descried in the heavens that beautiful crescent form of 

 Yenus, which was a complete proof of the movement of our planet 

 with the others round tlic sun, and tluit beautiful representation of 

 our solar system, Jupiter, with his attendant moons, and Saturn with 

 those extraordinary handles, as they seemed to him. Astronomy had 

 advanced to a point that required that man should be lifted up to the 

 heavens, or that the heavens should be brought down to him ; but 

 how could we believe that the simple transparent medium of glass 

 would accomplish this result ? 



When the brain of man had thus begun to explore the profundities 

 of space, and found that our sun was but a single sun among hosts 

 of others, and that our great astral system was Ijut one of thousands, 

 then did he sing in the words of the Psalmist : " What is man that 

 thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitests him ?" 

 The atheist sees in this the contemptible minitude of the earth as 

 compared with the magnitude of the universe. Hence the improba- 

 bility of Heaven being moved for our salvation. But thanks to the 

 genius of man, we have the response in the microscope, the same 

 transparent medium rounded in different forms, which tells us by its 

 refractive power, as you have heard from the lips of the President of 

 Columbia College, that we have revealed here beauties of configu- 

 ration which announces that the Almight}^ has almost expended him- 

 self upon this planet. The microscope answers the telescope. The 

 one tells us of Almighty God working in distant realms, so remote 

 that it is hard for imagination to conceive of the distance, and the 

 other of his power in such minitude that it almost surpasses the power 

 of the human brain to embrace the conception of his acts. But were 

 I to tell you of the wonders of the prism, the same medium, glass, 

 being cut in a wedge-form, I should reveal to you other extraordinary 

 powers of the solar ray. ■ We are all familiar with the experiment of 

 Newton, who, when the sunbeam passed through his prism, split it 

 up into its primary colors. He had the red, the yellow, the blue, and 

 the happily blended intermediate tints, the red and the yellow pro- 

 ducing orange, the yellow and blue producing gi-een, and beyond 

 these the indigo and the violet, the union of all being requisite for 

 that perfection which we see in ])ure white light. Furthermore, as 

 will be told you in the next lecture, not only are these various colors 

 produced, but at one extreme of the spectrum we have the heat, and 

 at the other the chemical beam, and in the intermediate one thelumi- 

 niferous l)eam, while we have also the phosphorescent rays, and those 



