522 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. 



rejoice amidst the sugar plantations of our heather warn and 

 welcome each other in songs which the bees of Hymettus sang 

 to each other ; and the grasshoppers signal from meadow to 

 meadow as they did of old, when the musical shiver of their 

 wings rang over Greece as its cradle-psalm." And again, speak- 

 ing of the compass -needle " as the guide of Vasco de Gama to 

 the East Indies, and of Columbus to the West Indies and the 

 New World, it was pre-eminently the precursor and pioneer of 

 the telegraph. Silently, and as with finger on its lips, it led 

 them across the waste of waters to the new homes of the world ; 

 but when these were largely filled, and houses divided between 

 the old and new hemispheres longed to exchange affectionate 

 greetings, it removed its finger and broke silence. The quiver- 

 ing magnetic needle which lies in the coil of the galvanometer 

 is the tongue of the electric telegraph, and already engineers 

 talk of it as speaking." 



One might almost think that Dr. Wilson was the living ana- 

 logue of that astronomical fact which he thus describes: 1 "I would 

 liken science and poetry in their natural interdependence to those 

 binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope 

 discovered to revolve round each other. ' There is one light of 

 the sun/ says St. Paul, ' and another of the moon, and another 

 of the stars : star differeth from star in glory/ It is so here. 

 That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, 

 is SCIENCE : that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues 

 and magnificent blaze, is POETRY. They revolve lovingly round 

 each other in orbits of their own, pouring forth and drinking in 

 the rays which they exchange ; and they both also move round 

 and shine towards that centre from which they came, even the 

 throne of Him who is the Source of all truth and the Cause of 

 all beauty." 



1 In ' The alleged Antagonism between Poetry and Chemistry.' 



