HARD WICKE' S SCIENCE- G O SSIP. 



171 



THE NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE. 



THAT there is nothing new under the sun we 

 know, and we may seriously inquire if there 

 is anything that is new in the universe. That a 

 planet at dewy moming looking in at a window 

 should assume the form of a patriot in the flush of 

 victor)- or a woman in child-birth, was the savage 

 yearning of the desert child who craved for sympathy, 

 and found it in the gems that shone ; and still as the 

 rule of our day-star is replaced by the distant twinkle 

 of the night-watches, an idea possesses us that the 

 seeds of passion are sown broad-cast in worlds un- 

 seen, and should a sparkle brighten or grow dim, we 

 experience a thrill of joy or shudder as if a powder- 

 mill had exploded. When it is our own sun that 

 kindles or tarnishes, we instinctively feel and more 

 fully realize that the joys and sorrows, or actual 

 calamities in our companionable planets, are then in 

 unison with our own, and our sympathy might even 

 raise a clamour that the columns of our daily news- 

 papers ought to extend to their coasts their categories 

 of eruptions, cyclones, and famines ; so far as rigid 

 statistics show these visitations to be coincident or 

 dependent on the state of the sun's disk : for in any 

 case in so doing we should not incur the stigma of 

 Chaucer's scholar, who predicted Noah's flood at 

 quarter night from the adage of the mighty San 

 Isidro : " Luna si summo comiculo maculas nigras 

 habuerit in primis mensibus, imbres ait fore." One 

 such deluge prophecy, however, on recent lines, it is 

 true, has the repute of being realized. It is singular, 

 says Raikes in his journal, that the old astrologers, 

 prophets, and almanack-makers, all agree in repre- 

 senting tie year 1S37 of the Incarnation as one of 

 the most calamitous. Galeotti, who lived under 

 Catherine de Medicis, says: "In that year the sun 

 will show itself weak, as if in continual languor, 

 which will prevent it ripening the fruits of the earth." 

 The clear-sighted James Scott also talks of copious 

 inundations that will drown the west, and Vavoust, 

 in his " Spectaculum Mundi," writes in a similar style. 

 M. Arago, taking for his basis the last eclipse of the 

 moon, is of opinion that the bad weather will con- 

 tinue until October. It is needless to add that this 

 being an epoch of a maximum of sun-spots, the sun 

 was actually in the condition foretold ; but as regards 

 rain, the previous year in England, according to 

 Symons, had been proverbially wetter. The price 

 of wheat rose. 



The transcendental idea in such predictions is, how- 

 ever, the old venerable notion of periods of work and 

 cessation, of kalpas and millenniums, and thus the 

 legendary Christmas-tree, with its bowls, knops, 

 lilies and pomegranates, as it stood obliquely south- 

 east and north-west against the southern wall of the 

 Arab tabernacle, sustained the dignity of the number 

 seven; while its Druid priest, as he contemplated 

 its seven branches perpetually glowing, one by one, 



like the moon and then known planets with the sun 

 in their midst, mentally reckoned up six days of 

 labour and a Sunday of rest, the seven years of 

 apprenticeship Jacob underwent for a Rachel, and 

 the seven times seven years, hard on the allotted ter- 

 mination of our earthly labours. The astrologically 

 incomplete notion of the harmony of the spheres, and 

 of the metallic globes coursing around the ring of the 

 zodiac to the seven notes of the diapason, modern 

 astronomers have transferred in idea to the central 

 sun-spots, which they suppose to resound with the 

 roar of the typhoon, the crash of the thunder, and 

 the groaning of the earth-throe ; a mighty engine at 

 work to prick out a telegram in Stenheil's alphabet, 

 which comes our way to decipher in the form of 

 many-coloured light, heat, and magnetism ; which 

 spelt out by the magnet and spectroscope, may allow 

 us to grasp peradventure the switch that sets in 

 motion the universe of lights, that our pioneer tele- 

 scopes have not yet fathomed. Since we have no 

 idea but length, breadth, and depth, what can be 

 beyond ? 



As regards the magnets working in observatories, 

 their general movements are undeniably responsive 

 to the degree of spottiness of the sun, but as for the 

 magnetic storms and chronic shakes, they appear to- 

 remain as intrinsically a wonder as when commented 

 on by Professor James Forbes in the Dissertation 

 appended to the Encyclopaedia Britannica ; for while 

 they are known to be simultaneous with earth cur- 

 rents that go forth to course over some considerable 

 portion of the globe, it is by no means absolutely 

 clear whether they come on directly responsive to a 

 big spot, a flash in sun, or to the slower progress of 

 a cold or hot wave over the earth's surface. Though 

 apprised of this incertitude, fondly hoping to catch 

 the faint melody of the spheres concerning which we 

 read, I took down the book of Observations at 

 Greenwich for a certain year during the spring of 

 which the sun-spots, as seen through my small tele- 

 scope, had dotted off a word on the face of the sun 

 very suggestive of the Mahdi ; and I thereupon 

 imagined the magnets to prick off their summer 

 caprice on a scale of music as a piano exercise for 

 certain young ladies, commencing at a rest that 

 coincided with the earthquake at Ischia, and termi- 



THE SONG OF THE SUN SPOTS. 

 Adagio 1 





Pi^ 



Fig. 107. 



nating in a dead stillness indicative of the Jovian 

 blowing up of Krakatoa. I was, however, vexed to 

 discover that the first two thermo-electrical bars, un- 

 fortunately for the infinities, droned over two coinci' 



I 2 



