AURORA BOREALIS. 217 
filled with dark forebodings of a visitation of God’s wrath, the scientist sees only 
the grand workings of the immediate laws of nature. 
The heavens illuminated with red light is to the superstitious a sure harbinger 
of impending wars: while the careful observer looks with delight upon the scene, 
and is impressed only with the sublimity of nature, poor unreasoning man is tor- 
tured with fears of coming evil. 
In the slow development of scientific knowledge, many and varied have 
been the theories put forth as to the origin of the Northern Lights, as we in this 
hemisphere call them. It is the reflection of sunlight by the ice at the pole, says 
one, while another contends that it is produced by great and internal fires whose 
chimney occupies the SPACE devoted by Dr. Kane to an open polar sea; but the 
more patient observers have pronounced it electric light. It is my present pur- 
pose to look out through the light of a few known facts in search of the origin of 
this great wonder. Not that any direct good will follow a successful inquiry in 
the matter of utilizing the light for street purposes or for private illumination, 
but if we can find the cause to be natural, and not supernatural, then one more 
old superstition that has haunted the memory and made life unhappy is gone—one 
more bugbear of tormenting fear is consigned to the shades of past ignorance. 
Newton discovered the law that controls the universe, and every child should be 
taught this law, for withoutit we can comprehend nothing in nature. How life 
is produced, how worlds, how suns, and planets formed and held in their orbits, 
is known only through this law. 
‘‘ ach atom has an attraction for each other atom in the universe, and the 
attraction is proportionate to their size, and is lessened as the square of the dis- 
tance which separates them increases.” Late developments in scientific research 
lead to the conclusion that all the varied original elements in nature, so-called, are 
resolvable back to one, and that one to energy. Also that light, heat, electricity 
and sound are only different phases of motion. 
Heat is the arrest of motion, and all the warmth we get from the sun is pro- 
duced by the stoppage of the heat waves sent out by its throbbing power. Chem- 
ical heat is created by the clash of little worlds of gas beating together, and no 
exception is known to the rule, that heat is the arrest of motion. 
All the heat and all the energy we get on the earth come from the sun.. The 
rainclouds are lifted from the ocean; the winds sweep over the mountains and 
across the moors, the blood of life, the sap of vegetation, all propelled by the pow- 
er of the sun. The visible power expended on our little globe passes all efforts of 
comprehension, but it is naught compared with the latent hidden energy. The 
decomposition of one drop of water produces a power equal to the most terrific 
thunder storm ever witnessed, while the decomposition of one grain of water 
_ produces a force equal to the discharge of 800,000 Leyden jars. All this but 
_ shadows the vast amount of energy that comes to us from the sun. Our earth is 
but a speck in space, and not a two thousand-millionth part of the energy thrown 
off by the sun strikes us, but is expended out in dark, empty space. This in- 
