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WATKINSON LIBRARY
HARTFORD, CONN.
GIFT OF
I
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE MOUNTAIN ANTHEM.
THE BEATITUDES IN RHYTHMIC ECHOES.
BY WILLIAM C. RICHARDS.
Elegantly bound in cloth, full gilt, $1.50; or in the beautiful
"Golden Floral" stifle. Covers in colors. Gilded,
fringed, and tasselled, $1.75,
THE Beatitudes, or Christ's " Sermon on the Mount," constitute,
perhaps, one of the most familiar passages in Sacred Scripture.
Embodying, as they do, all the graces of true manhood and woman
hood, it is not to be wondered at that they have so often inspired the
minister and the poet. The cordial approval which was bestowed
upon Professor Richards's versified interpretation of David's sweet
est psalm induced him to apply the same spirit and method to the
Beatitudes. His rendering is, indeed, but " rhythmic echoes;" but
they are echoes which appeal lovingly to all devoted and submissive
hearts. Miss Humphrey's illustrations are full of expression.
THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD.
THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM IN SONG AND SONNET.
BY WILLIAM C. RICHARDS.
Elegantly bound in cloth, full gilt, $1.50; or in the beautiful
"Golden Floral" style. Covers in colors. Gilded,
fringed, and tasselled, $1.75.
MANY eminent clergymen and laymen who have examined either
the manuscript or the advance sheets have expressed their cordial
approval and admiration of the design, spirit, and manner of the
work. The pastoral simplicity of the sweetest of all the Psalms is
wrought into the several poems with a charming effect. The work is
ornamented with sixteen full-page illustrations by Miss Humphrey
and* other female artists. Such a volume, superb in every feature,
cannot but afford pleasure and spiritual nutriment to many thousands
of readers.
Sold by all booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt
of price.
LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers.
SCIENCE IN SONG
NATURE IN NUMBERS
BY
WILLIAM C. RICHARDS, A.M., PH.D.
" Sweet Nature, gilded by the gracious gleam
Of letters dear to Science, dear to Art."
TENNYSON.
" Science has not destroyed Poetry, nor expelled the Divine from
Nature, but has furnished the material and given the presages of
a higher poetry and a mightier philosophy than the world has yet
seen." DK. HENRY MAUDSLEY.
BOSTON
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM
1885
COPYRIGHT, 1884,
BY LEE AND SHEPARD.
All rights reserved.
Shall Science win no meed of song,
To whom all harmonies belong,
And poets' praises,
Her realm the wide expanse of light,
While to the outer stars her flight
Our knowledge raises?
Oh for the voice of seraphim
To breathe a high and worthy hymn
By inspiration !
Her themes of wonder to expand,
Her trophies meet for Milton's grand
Delineation.
"With wit my wishes far outrun,
I dedicate Love's labor done
To STAR-EYED SCIENCE,
And on the grandeur of her scope,
To please my reader, fix my hope
And sole reliance.
626160
PREFATORY.
To say, in the preface of this book, that writing
verse has been the author's recreation in the brief
intervals of grave and oftentimes exhausting profes
sional labor, would be a fitting apology for its presen
tation to his personal friends only ; but to make this
representation to the public may not avail to satisfy
that exacting community of its raison d'etre.
It happens, however, that his verse-writing, which
has been in a sense his pastime, does not include
this little volume, which, as its themes will suggest to
the intelligent reader, required more than moments of
leisure and relaxation for its preparation.
It is generally though erroneously supposed that
philosophy and poetry in union are incongruous, and
Vlll PREFATORY,
perhaps the fortunate examples of their combination
are too few to be pleaded in refutation of this impres
sion. There is certainly but little Science in Song in
our literature. The volumes of poetry devoted to
scientific themes may be counted, probably, on one's
fingers, beginning a century ago with "The Botanic
Garden," by ERASMUS DARWIN, the grandfather of the
late distinguished naturalist and biologist, CHARLES
DARWIN, the author of books (though not in rhythm)
unhappily burdened with the apocryphal theories of
" Evolution," and the " Descent of Man " from lower
types of animal life.
A century, therefore, of remarkable science devel
opment and progress, and abounding, also, in poets
both major and minor in rank, has not been prolific
in poems devoted to science. Poems of nature are,
indeed, exceedingly numerous, and constitute a rich
and prominent portion of the anthology of the nine
teenth century.
The paucity of metrical interpretations of the prin
ciples and laws of natural science is due to two
causes, the general unfamiliarity with these laws
and their effects, and, beyond this, the prevailing im-
PREFATORY. IX
pression, already referred to, of the unfitness of such
material for poetical form and fervor.
A different perception of the relations of the phi
losophy of nature to poetry the highest form of
expression in language is the author's self-justifica
tion for publishing this attempt to intertwine the mar
vels of Science with the measures of Song ; and he
hopes to reach, as his best reward, the hearts of many
earnest readers, and, it may be, to lead them
" To look through nature up to nature's God."
CHICAGO, Oct. 18, 1884.
CONTENTS.
EN AVANT iii
SCIENCE IN SONG . I
STEAM . . . .. ... . . 5
THE SONG OF STEAM . . . . . . 5
ELECTRICITY . ... . . . . 10
THE SONG OF THE AMBER SPRITE . . 12
THE SPECTROSCOPE 16
THE SONG OF THE PRISM 17
MAGNETISM . . ... . . .22
THE SONG OF THE MAGNET . . . . 28
OXYGEN . -31
THE SONG OF OXYGEN 32
HYDROGEN 36
THE SONG OF HYDROGEN 37
HEAT . 41
THE SONG OF HEAT 43
Xll . CONTENTS.
PACE
THE TELESCOPE .... . . . . 46
THE LAY OF THE TELESCOPE . . . . 51
CARBON . ^6
THE STORY OF CARBON . . ' . . ' ... 57
THE SUN . . .. . . . . . . 5^
OUR DEBT TO THE SUN .... . . 66
THE STARS . . . . . . .74
HYMN TO THE STARS . . . . .77
THE COMET . . . . . . . . 81
OWED TO COGGIA'S COMET ... . 84
THE MARCH OF SCIENCE . . ... .91
SCIENCE AND SONG NOT DIVORCED ... 93
THE OUTLOOK OF THE HOUR . . . .98
MY ORACLE . v .' ; -. 4 . . . I0 4
L'ENVOI . ... L \.\' .. . . . 107
MY SCIENCE ... . . . . 109
NOTES - . i
SCIENCE IN SONG.
I SING the fame of lustrous Science, won
In many a field that lies from Earth to Sun,
A hundred trophies with no mantling stain,
Grand victories the sword could never gain ;
Not regal pride, nor warlike greed, to sate ;
Not selfish love to serve, nor vengeful hate ; '
Not realm or state in boundaries to extend,
But the wide world to bless from end to end,
Conquests that conquer enmities and feuds,
That soften strifes, and people solitudes,
Make the drear desert fragrant with the rose,
And gleams of universal peace disclose.
A hundred trophies to my theme belong,
Effulgent Science, meet for crown and song ;
2 SCIENCE IN SONG.
And these the suns, apart from thousands less,
Whose planet-radiance on our paths we bless.
For if with awe we trace among the stars
Her footfalls in their mystic spectral bars,
Her subtle skill the comet's bulk that weighs,
And turns its terrors to a harmless haze ;
Gauges the depths where unseen planets roll,
And binds lone Neptune to the Sun's con
trol ; 2
Resolves to figures that we shrink to say,
The mad pulsations of the violet ray; 3
Sifts the murk gloom the expiring red that
bounds,
Till metals flash like suns in its profounds ; 4
Or, in the void beyond the sky-born tints,
Plucks the weird force the chemic page that
prints ; s
Catches the lightnings on their fulgent wings,
And tones their voices to our common things,
When, needing messengers to send afar,
With blazing breath they answer, " Here we
are ; " 6
SCIENCE IN SONG. 3
If these grand exploits with amaze we see,
While yet unveiled hides half their mystery,
In lighter marvels with relief we scan
The household bounties Science yields to man.
Innumerous these as autumn's wind-tossed
leaves,
Or precious grain that droops her yellow
sheaves.
The glowing gas by which these lines I trace,
Long-prisoned image of the Sun's bright face,
Set free by Science from its carbon cell,
Turns night to day, and waste to wealth as
well,
Whose subtle breath, to be a blessing quite,
Needs yet, that, like itself, its cost be light,
Lest soon in all our homes the electric slips
Of Edison its fainter glow eclipse ;
Or carbon candles, a la. Jablochkoff, 7
With their weird splendor burn its profits off;
Or, likelier still, the dynamos of Brush,
Or Siemens' engines, rout it with a rush,
4 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Till gas-stocks fall, and dividends, alas !
That once were gold, shall turn out only gas.
Be wise, ye gas-men, put it on the street,
A dollar for a thousand cubic feet ; 8
And then, in spite of Maxim, new or old,
Or Menlo Park, your gas shall still be gold.
Nor light alone, but warmth, from Science
comes.
In tropic airs to demi-arctic homes,
Where subterranean /Etnas vent their fires,
And heat's old romance in their blast expires.
The cheerful grate, so grateful once, we miss,
And back-logs huge no longer snap and hiss ;
But Science keeps our chambers free from
dust,
And all our registers pronounce her just.
STEAM.
STEAM.
IN the caprices of a winter dream,
I saw fair Science in the guise of Steam.
I knew her right the airy mask to wear ;
Her vapory breath imbued the cool crisp
air ;
In silvery mists, half lucent as they rolled,
She floated round me in each filmy fold,
And swaying to and fro, like Brocken wraith, 9
She sans this carol of her life and faith :
THE SONG OF STEAM.
I was born of Fire and Water ;
My father and mother are they ;
And theirs is a wonderful daughter,
At work or at play.
SCIENCE IN SONG.
I drew in a homely tea-kettle
The first storied gasp of my breath, 10
And, loosed from a prison of metal,
I vanish in death.
The stronger the walls of my prison,
The fiercer I grow in my strength,
From the womb of the water uprisen,
A giant at length,
A giant with man for my master,
To slave at his bidding and beck,
At the slight little risk of disaster,
With ruin and wreck.
I prove him the myths of old fable :
In fleetness and force unconfined,
Upborne on my wings, he is able
To outstrip the wind.
The mightiest blows of Thor's hammer "
I help his right arm to excel :
STEAM. 7
The anvils of Vulcan in clamor
He silences well.
The continents narrow and dwindle
Before the wild rush of his steed,
In whose iron bosom I kindle
A passion for speed.
I wrested from Neptune his trident,
That man might rule over the deep ;
And his ships, breathing fire, go strident
On billows asleep.
Oh ! I am the bond-slave of Science,
And shrink from no labor for man :
I breathe to his foes his defiance,
And slay where I can.
No pride in my heart makes me falter,
Though menial the task he demands :
Not his horse is more true to his halter
Than I to his hands.
SCIENCE IN SONG.
His ploughshares and weapons I fashion
For harvests of bread or of blood ;
My breath's the hot blast of his passion ;
I toil for his food.
I open his paths through the mountains
In resonant archways of stone ;
His cities are sweet with my fountains
From great lakes upthrown.
I stamp the bright coins of his treasures,
I break the rude stones of his street,
I slave in the gloomy coal-measures
Far under his feet.
I sink the deep mines when I'm bidden,
And marshal his gnomes to their toils,
Where the gold and the silver lie hidden,
To gather rich spoils.
The stern blasts of winter I soften
To airs of the South in his homes,
STEAM. C
And his swift-winged coaches as often
Keep warm as he roams.
When the fervor of midsummer kindles,
I drive the cool wind through his halls :
My zeal, like my vigor, ne'er dwindles,
Though redoubled his calls.
If he plots with the masters of Science
The lightnings to yoke to his task,
They serve him with me in alliance,
Nor come till I ask.
Ungrudging I work, and unshrinking,
While service and succor man needs ;
And the force will come late, I am thinking,
That Steam supersedes.
10 SCIENCE IN SONG.
ELECTRICITY.
"A RAILWAY-STATION and a summer night,"
Thus might the title read of what I write.
I waited for a train behind its time ;
And such delay our habit counts a crime,
Which in our grandsires' day had brought no
trace
Of vexed impatience on his placid face.
To while the weary hour, I tried in vain
To catch some tidings of the tardy train.
The telegraph, upon its guarded shelf,
Clicked now and then, as chuckling to itself.
My untrained ear had not the facile sense
To catch the sounds, and sift some meaning
thence ;
But while I listened with a listless will,
A violet haze appeared the place to fill :
ELECTRICITY. 1 1
The brazen register to giant form
Grew, like a thunder-cloud before a storm.
I started, less with terror than surprise,
As now the shape bent on me glistening
eyes ;
Around his brow a filmy fillet twined
Of fitful flames, as fanned by fickle wind ;
Within his hands gleamed javelins of strange
light,
Which rayed weird splendors out upon the
night ;
And while the wonder grew, my heart beat
quick
To hear from out his breast the well-known
click,
When suddenly, instead, a witching strain
Of music soothed me like a summer rain ;
And then I knew the spirit of the wires
Was chanting to me from electric lyres
A strain more sweet than that of fabled
birds,
Somehow translated to me in these words :
12 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE SONG OF THE AMBER-SPRITE.
Shall I tell you, O dreamer ! my story,
To while the dull lapse of the night ?
Men see but faint gleams of the glory
That crowns me Electron I2 the Bright.
I was born ere the granites were moulded,
Or the gems in earth's coronal set,
While the wings of the morning were folded
O'er chaos and darkness as yet.
I fused the bright gems to their splendor,
I wrought the hard granites to form,
I fashioned the dewdrops so tender,
With the force that enkindled the storm.
Though I spoke with the tones of the thunder,
And looked in the lightnings abroad,
Men gauged not the scope of my wonder,
And shrunk from the flash of my sword.
Asleep in a beautiful chamber,
A sage of the days long ago
ELECTRICITY. 13
Beheld me through lattice of amber,
Yet little he learned of me so.' 3
Along the slow march of the ages,
'Mid the records of History's hand,
That blazoned or blackened her pages,
Unstoried for eras I stand. 14
Then Science sprang up like a giant,
And warmed with the wine of desire,
To phantoms of mystery defiant,
She bade them unmask, or retire.
I heard, and, the bolts of my thunder
Despoiled of their terrible might,
I ran, in the trance of my wonder,
Down the cord of a venturous kite.' 5
That kite, in the hand of my master,
The spell of my mystery broke ;
And service henceforth for disaster
I yield as I bow to his yoke.
14 SCIENCE IN SONG.
The myths of his boyhood I fashion
To marvels surpassing their fame,
Old fables of power and passion
Transformed into truths, yet the same.
What was Mercury else than a presage
Of me, as I run to and fro,
And girdle the globe with man's message,
Or glide with it broad seas below ?
The touch of King Midas 16 the Golden
Prefigured my work in the cell,
Where the exquisite parable olden
In tangible beauty I tell.
The fable of Fine-Ear, translated
To fact in the telephone's wire,
Is marvel of mine, only mated
With my currents of legible fire.
And soon with miraculous splendor
The cities of Earth I shall light,
ELECTRICITY. 15
And mortals new praises shall render,
And thanks to Electron the Bright.
My song on my lips faints and lingers,
So broad are the trophies I scan,
When the marvellous touch of my ringers
Has wrought all the wonders it can.
For I am the king of the forces,
Of sway in the earth and the sea ;
And infinite suns, in their courses,
Keep step to their music through me.
1 6 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE SPECTROSCOPE.
ONE day in June, beneath a London sky,
Blue, for the nonce, as that of Italy,
I pressed with eager haste to catch the sun
Unveiled some favored hours from smoke-
drifts dun
In the great glass that from fair Tulse-hill's
dome I7
Lifts its broad mirror to his fulgent home,
Where HUGGINS, with keen spectroscopic zest,
Rends the rare secrets from the solar breast.
Bidden of his large courtesy, I went
On hydrogen and nickel lines intent.
Swift through the ponderous tube the errant ray
Shot down in many a bright, divergent way,
As from the spectrum's red to violet's bound
The sorcerer turned his crystal prisms round.
THE SPECTROSCOPE. I/
The noontide fervor and the wildering light,
It must have been they dazed my sober
sight ;
For to my view uprose a prismy form,
Robed as in rainbows woven of the storm.
I caught the fringe of her diaphanous robe,
Eager the riddle to its core to probe ;
But, all confused, I blundered at the start :
Quite guiltless of the interviewer's art,
I asked the radiant maid (I shudder now
At my impertinence), " How old art thou ? "
Her rainbow raiment rustled with surprise.
And a sweet anger warmed her violet eyes ;
Yet with angelic grace she veiled her ire,
And flashed this answer in prismatic fire:
THE SONG OF THE PRISM.
How old am I ? Ah ! who shall say ?
Old as the sun's first golden ray
That through the raindrops cleft its way
1 8 SCIENCE IN SONG.
In days when Time was young,
And tinted bow in heaven was bent,
The smile of God, His sacrament,
To chastened earth, of wrath outspent,
As Hebrew sung.
A million rainbows on the sky
I painted as the years rolled by,
With rapture for the poet's eye,' 8
And God's dear peace for all ;
And Time by eras glided on,
While still the bow of promise shone,
With naught of my deep secret known,
Through cloudy pall.
Yet I was then the lucent prism ;
And the slant sun- ray through my chrism
Sprang forth from its divine baptism,
God's covenant with men.
Carved from the crystal now by skill,
I fashion rainbow beauties still,
While subtler miracles I fulfil,
Undreamed of then.
THE SPECTROSCOPE. 1 9
In Newton's hand I broke the spell
Of silence Nature kept so well,
And made the arrowy light-beam tell
The mystery of its mould ; ' 9
Unwound its twisted thread to seven,
Like the fair arch that spans the heaven,
Of broader truth the kindling leaven
Thence to unfold.
As the small acorn holds the oak,
Whose rounded crest long years invoke,
By slow degrees the splendor broke,
Fore-signed in rainbows bright.
Not Newton plucked both flower and fruit
His Memnon to his touch grew mute,
And Science stayed her far pursuit
Of phantom light.
Deep in my lucent bosom lay,
To wake from charmed trance one day,
When some keen glance the hidden way
20 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Into its maze divines, 20
A volume of transcendent lore,
Unread of mortal eyes before,
A scroll of splendor, blotted o'er
With mystic lines.
Now in my tell-tale face the skies
Mirror their long-veiled mysteries :
From sun and star the shadow flies,
More eloquent than light ;
Each line a language that betrays
The temper of the starry clays,
Made up, at most, in Earth's old ways,
If read aright.
What marvel that the unthinking doubt
The secrets in my breast found out,
All the deep realms of space about,
Where thought and sight may range !
Yet on my guileless face in vain
Their vague unfaith shall breathe its stain ;
Its lustre glows undimmed again :
Truth knows no change.
SPECTROSCOPE. 21
No earth-enkindled flame that glows,
No ray from stellar fount that flows,
But shall its secret source disclose
At my confessional.
Linked with the lens, throughout all space
The fashions of the suns I'll trace,
And paint their legends on my face,
In light for all.
22 SCIENCE IN SONG.
MAGNETISM.
GIVE ear, I pray you, to a fable old,
By Pliny, in his Roman legends, told
Of a young shepherd of Magnesia born,
Who kept his father's flock with crook and
horn,
And led them at high noon to shaded fount,
Which welled in music's flow from Ida's
Mount-
One day the lad, his feeding flock in sight,
Climbed in caprice a neighboring rocky height,
When sudden fright his stalwart body shook ;
For hob-nailed shoes and iron-pointed crook,
Fast to the rock, like limpets to a cliff,
But for his tremors, held him fast and stiff.
Of all the loadstone feats old legends trace,
This one of Magnes holds the foremost place, 21
MAGNETISM. 2$
But leaves our wonder, I am fain to say,
In doubt to settle fioiv Jie got aivay.
I give no date for this attractive tale :
Hence critics chronological will fail
If they dispute my postulate that here
The A B C of Magnetism's clear.
Fragments, perchance, of that enchanted
rock,
By curious pilgrims hammered from the block,
In rare museums and in monkish cells,
Spread far and wide the fame of magic spells,
When mimic boats with iron at their bows
On mimic lakes advanced their tiny prows,
As at the brink the conjurer held the stone,
But seemed to draw them by his will alone.
Thus Science, in those dim and distant days,
Shrouded in films of fear, or blank amaze,
From cautious or from curious eyes retired,
Nor with an ardent love the age inspired.
E'en subtle Thales, the Ionian sage,
The foremost savant of his clime and age,
24 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Who gauged the pyramids with shadow-rules,
And founded great Greek philosophic schools,
Yet, like a child of some new toy possessed,
Trifled one day with a most royal guest.
The potent spirit of the thunder-storm
Appeared to him in soft bewitching form,
Wrapped in a glittering veil of amber wove.
She proffered him the visored bolts of Jove.
He, with the pretty mask content to play,
The tricksy sprite offended, fled away,
And left her amber guise alone to be
For ages the vague veil of mystery. 22
And great Sir Isaac, in our modern time,
Made, and yet missed at once, a step sub
lime
In that grand quest for truth, to cease no
more
Till height and depth remain not to explore ;
Though often still, no doubt, a while to halt,
As wit, or way, or wisdom lies at fault.
Which baffled Newton in the case at hand,
You from recital brief shall understand.
MAGNETISM. 25
Two hundred years ago, o'er all the earth
Light broke anew as of a second birth,
When Newton in his prism empaled its
gleam,
And into seven bright hues dissolved the
beam.
The sage, transported, saw the ruptured ray
Its pictured image on the wall portray,
And paused his quest, the startled world to tell
The horoscope of light he'd cast so well.
O fatal halt ! that sevenscore years held back 23
The march triumphant on that lucent track.
Too muck and yet too little light from heaven
At that high hour supreme to him was given,
Too little only that too much befell ;
Mark, and this riddle I'll resolve you well.
Sunlight in clustered rays too copious stole
On the dense crystal through a rounded hole,
And, all dissolved, their images o'erlapped,
And their solution in pure colors wrapped.
With the device of far less light let in,
Cleft to a slender shaft through crevice thin,
26 SCIENCE IN SONG.
The conscious prism at that sovran call,
Had told, not half the truth alone, but all.
What matter, save for Newton's perfect fame?
Two centuries late we have it, all the same, 21
And subtle prisms on the spectrum show
What's in the light of all the suns we know.
The orator, by some side-light betrayed,
Has often from his theme a trifle strayed ;
And what in him your lenience would excuse,
You'll deal with -gently in the errant Muse,
Since to her shepherd-boy on Ida's brow,
To find the thread she dropped, she hastens now.
That myth of Magnes farther on we trace
In legend of Mohammed's burial-place.
His coffin hung the earth and sky between,
Poised cloudlike in the air, at twilight seen.
The silly tale the Moslem bosom fired,
And in the Prophet's name new faith inspired :
The outside world, with wonder for belief,
Its doubt to Science lifted for relief,
MAGNETISM. 2/
When Burkhardt sought the mosque in which
he died,
And proved beyond dispute the legend lied !
Thus cunning fable fades the truth before,
As time and story speed the centuries o'er,
And the wild visions of Arabian Nights
Pale in the blaze of science-kindled lights.
What did not hold the shepherd by his heels
Can stop to-day the train's swift-circling wheels,
Or chain the iron fire-ship to the quay,
And task her engines strained to set her
free.
Reclined upon the " Egypt's " deck I lay,
Close by her binnacle, one sultry day ;
No air astir save what the great ship drew
On every side, as through the foam she flew.
The sun and silence lulled me that I fell
Into a dream, or some bewildering spell;
For murmurs heard but then through all the
ship,
Grew mute, like Fear with finger on her lip,
28 SCIENCE IN SONG.
And sunk to rest the endless vibrant play
Of Titan engines throbbing night and day.
I marked, amazed, Ixion at the wheel,
And saw a purple cloud about him steal ;
Which fading from my sight, there shone
instead
A violet nimbus o'er the compass shed,
Out of whose flame a quivering music rung,
Soft but distinct, and this the song it sung :
THE SONG OF THE MAGNET.
I am the hardy sailor's bride :
Over the seas his ships I guide,
Over the brine, from coast to coast,
Though by mad billows vexed and tost.
Before the mariner wed with me,
He sailed in fear the narrowest sea ; 2S
And on the rock his bark was broke,
Though stoutly wrought from heart of oak.
MAGNETISM. 2Q
The world was meagre then to him,
With a broad ocean for its brim,
The bulwarks of whose roaring wave
He might not scorn, and dared not brave.
Then I, the loadstar of the North,
Came from my crystal chamber forth,
And won my sailor's happy eyes,
Feigning the Magnet's dim disguise.
Still loyal to my native home,
Across whatever seas I roam,
Love's fires within my bosom burn,
And day and night to that I turn ;
Content in exile, that by me
My sailor has subdued the sea,
And on its farthest billows sails
Exultant in its wildest gales.
I led the daring Genoese
Across the wastes of Western seas,
30 SCIENCE IN SONG.
%
And kept his faith and courage fast,
Till the New World he found at last.
This mighty ship is mine to keep
While twice five hundred eyelids sleep ;
And, blow the blast, or fall the fog,
She trusts me and the faithful log.
Oh ! I am the hardy sailor's bride,
And cleave forever to his side,
Till he to Death gives up his ship,
And lets his last life-anchor slip.
OXYGEN. 31
OXYGEN.
ONE night I slept within a narrow room,
To wake before the dawn, oppressed with
gloom,
Rest to my wearied senses half denied,
While ghostly shapes around me seemed to
glide.
A taper's struggling gleam the phantasm
quelled,
And presage of quick malady dispelled.
The chamber's lattice, and its door close
shut,
That trance of terror on my spirit put.
Breathed o'er and o'er, the poisoned air could
give
Scarce to the flame or me the strength to
live.
32 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Then through the wide-flung casement sprang
the breeze,
Laden with scented bloom from apple-trees,
Till what my tortured brain had deemed a
tomb
I knew was just a close and stifling room.
Again I slept in sweet repose, and, lo !
A liquid music round me seemed to flow :
It may have been the matin-notes of birds,
But then I think the songs had wanted words,
While on the tide of sound that flowed to me
I'm sure this message filled the melody:
THE SONG OF OXYGEN.
Monarch am I of land and sea ;
The realms of life are ruled by me
Since Nature's morning ;
With hosts of choiring stars I sung
When Heaven's cerulean veil was flung
O'er the virgin Earth, demure and young,
For her adorning.
OXYGEN. 33
By God's decree, when Earth was made,
Through its vapory sphere the role I played
Of master-builder ;
To Hydrogen, my queen, first wed
The great sea was our bridal bed,
And secrets then beneath us spread
Man's thoughts bewilder.
In that broad realm of mystery deep,
By-ways from human ken I keep
I shaped this planet ;
With kisses cooled the hot desire
Of fervid mists, and changed their fire
(As heat and glow in strength expire)
To ribs of granite.
Amid the rocks I scattered gems
With thoughts of royal diadems
For coming ages :
To-day in kingly crowns they shine,
With golden hair their splendors twine,
And shed their lustre on each line
Of History's pages.
34 SCIENCE IN SONG.
I laid the iron in beds of ore,
And planted coals in boundless store
In secret places,
Till men had need of chains to bind
Earth's Titan forces, and the wind
In tireless speed to leave behind,
O'er desert spaces.
When thou wast born, and a feeble sigh
Proclaimed a new life's mystery,
I was its warden:
Over thy cradle, night and day,
I hung, to keep thy lungs at play;
And I must watch till thy dust they lay
In Death's white garden.
Till Time shall end, as through its past,
The hills and groves to dust I cast,
Creation's great Iconoclast,
By God's ordaining :
Only the sunbeam stays my hand
From wielding o'er the sea and land
A sceptre of supreme command,
In silence reigning.
OXYGEN. 35
When I to stony sleep would bring
In every realm each vital thing,
New forces from the great Sun spring
For its renewal :
So dust and breath alternate reign,
The dead world leaps to life again,
As through the ages we maintain
Our service dual.
King of the air and earth and sea,
All force of being inheres in me,
And all its changes :
In life and death, in bloom and blight,
If but my mission be read aright,
From end to end of earth, in might,
My sceptre ranges.
36 SCIENCE IN SONG.
HYDROGEN.
A CRIMSON bubble, fast upon a string
That swayed and fluttered like a redbird's wing,
Gave joyance to a child whose happy mood
Was to my weary heart both wine and food.
I watched the tossing sphere and laughing boy,
And gauged by them the sources of true joy :
Convinced they lie within ourselves, and spring
In inner thought more than in outer thing.
"The boy is happy in himself," I said;
And while I spoke, lo ! all his joy had fled :
The buoyant bubble from his grasp was gone,
And the small face a sudden woe took on.
The outward thing his mode of feeling made,
And of my logic its defect betrayed.
In vain I bade him mark the bubble soar
That pleased me better, but the boy no more.
HYDROGEN. 37
I bought, at length, the surcease of his sorrow
By promise of another ball to-morrow,
A cheap device, for quick my memory then
Ran through the chronicles of Hydrogen.
Musing, I watched the red speck on the sky
Till I grew conscious of a presence nigh :
I saw not, only felt, a breath alone,
A faint, half-spoken, half a sighing tone.
With ear attent, and all my senses stirred,
This seemed to me the gist of what I heard:
THE SONG OF HYDROGEN.
SUBTLE of breath, of shape unseen,
Over two realms I reign as queen ;
Water and Fire my sceptre own,
The flood and flame alike my throne.
In the dim past, when on the deep
Darkness lay brooding like a sleep,
God's spirit breathed and moved through me
To let the world of waters be.
38 SCIENCE IN SONG.
So, in the first red flame that curled
From the pure bosom of the world,
My essence and my breath were blent
In its ascending sacrament.
And ever since, of kindled fire,
Without my breath, the flames expire ;
And seas and lakes and streams, bereft
Of me, were void and formless left.
Yet in my double realm I reign
Only in wedlock's mystic chain,
Divorced from which, my thrones would pass
Like mists away in unseen gas.
With kingly Oxygen allied,
Since when the worlds were made his bride,
I shine with splendor in the flame,
And give the floods their form and name.
Uncounted rubies in my crown
Flash as the flames play up and down ;
HYDROGEN. 39
And gorgeous beads of amber deck
With quivering rays my lissome neck.
The dewdrops are my queenly pearls ;
And, when the wind the wavelet curls,
Like countless stars my diamonds gleam
In tremulous flame along the stream.
My breath, congealed by boreal blast,
O'er all the wintry world I cast,
And mould the Arctic seas to forms
That fright the sailor more than storms.
In softer temper toward the Moon,
I swiftly toss the light balloon,
That man through airy zones may move,
And mate the cloud-compelling JOVE.
When Science lends his hand the skill
To match the ardor of his will,
I'll bear him like an eagle o'er
Dividing seas to any shore.
4O SCIENCE IN SONG.
'Twas well you dried the urchin's tear
With promise of another sphere :
His may the high, proud fortune be
To guide my chariots o'er the sea.
Bend down your ear, I'll whisper low
What all the world may come to know
Though I'm a vapor, breath unseen,
Save as I glow in flame's pure sheen,
I, to the metal line allied,
May one day boast a solid pride,
And to no doubtful honor come
As lustrous Hydrogenium.^
HEAT. 41
HEAT.
ONE August afternoon an evil fate,
For the swift steamer " Red Wing," made
me late.
Her foam-wreathed wheels gleamed on my
cheated sight
With hint of coolness that inflamed me quite ;
And, hot and angry with myself and her,
From the thronged pier I vowed I would not
stir
From two till four, but wait the " Naiad's "
turn,
And let the sun and my impatience burn.
In the slight shelter of % an awning rude,
Scarce less removed from shade than solitude,
I nursed my sultry mood upon a stool,
And called myself by privilege a fool.
42 SCIENCE IN SONG.
The wharfinger, the while I mopped my face,
Looked with a glance, half glee and half
grimace,
Then said, " You're up among the nineties,
Cap;"
And for his humor I forgave the chap.
The heat, despite the din of trucks and drays,
O'ercame my senses like a poppied haze,
Until I dreamed, and in my dreaming felt
My flesh and bones at once begin to melt.
Before my eyes, which like two fire-balls
seemed,
Thermometers by hundreds shot and gleamed,
And, lengthening ever as they danced in
glee,
Flashed on my gaze their simmering mercury ;
Then in a swift, tumultuous whirl they spun,
And of a sudden their, wild waltz was done.
Their bursting balls around me harmless
hissed,
And all the air grew dense with silvery mist.
HEAT. 43
No more I saw or heard ; yet with strange sense,
As though I heard, I owned. a spell intense,
That with all force of speech, unvocal still,
Held me in awed subjection to its will.
I know not how its weird intent I learned,
Unless by 'thoughts that breathed, and words
that burned ; '
Though on my memory, when my vision broke,
This song was scorched like lightning-blaze on
oak :
THE SONG OF HEAT.
Ha, ha ! I am mighty to rule and to rend,
And my home's in the breast of the Sun ;
To the tip of his sceptre my breath I extend,
With the beat of his pulses I run.
Ye mortals, who dwell on this Liliput globe,
How little of me ye can learn,
Though your lenses and daring pyrometers
probe
The caverns and cells where I burn !
44 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Beneath your equator, I give you a taste
Of my breath in its torrid degrees,
Where it scorches the soil to a verdureless
waste,
And the brute from its fierce fervor flees.
At my home in the Sun, the solids I fuse
Till to vaporous clouds they distil,
And some from the shadow-ruled spectrum
you lose,
Decomposed in my volcanic thrill. 27 *
For thousands of planets my breath would
suffice
To flood them with beauty and bloom : 2S
Denied it, their vigor would fade in a trice,
And each of its life be the tomb.
I move where I will, with invisible wing,
By invisible methods I toil ;
I spread o'er the earth the green mantle of
Spring,
I ripen its fruits for your spoil.
HE A T. 45
I breathe o'er the Alps, and the glaciers flow
down ;
From their crests the fierce avalanche
roars ;
Sweet odors through all the green valleys are
blown,
And Autumn unbosoms her stores.
I fuse the strong metals to shapes for man's
needs,
Till the earth and the seas he subdues ;
For his trophies of peace, and his red-handed
deeds
My ploughshares and swords he must use
I am ever at work, and never at play.
Through me the stars burn, and worlds
spin,
And wisely, your modern philosophers say,
In motion I end or begin. 29
46 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE TELESCOPE.
SHALL I forget, while I remember aught,
A name, a man, with soul and sweetness
fraught ?
Thy name, thyself, dear MiTCHEL, 30 to forget,
Would leave me poor, with all-else memories yet.
I count the years since thou wast rapt away,
Each with a tear fresh as I wept that clay,
When, midst the horrid din of civil war,
The tidings smote me from, the scene afar
That thou, in battle's harness for the right,
Hadst left a living foe with Death to fight ;
And, 'neath the orange or palmetto shade,
With sad and sudden burial-rites wast laid.
Before that fatal strife, through all the land,
Transformed the service of thy cunning hand,
THE TELESCOPE. 47
So it laid down the transit and the chart,
And plied with patriot zeal the soldier's art
How oft I knew thy friendly foot's advance !
How oft I felt the welcome of thy glance,
As, on the crest of Dudley Hill, I came 31
To the fair temple of thy starry fame,
To feed my hungering soul with bread of
heaven,
Raised with the magic of thy subtle leaven ;
And slake its thirst with brimming draughts
of wine
Pressed from the grapes of knowledge near
divine !
What Science lost when thou didst draw the
sword,
This sole fame adds to patriotism's hoard,
That thy great heart, supreme among the stars,
Sank vainly in the maelstrom of our wars.
Thy vacant seat in Dudley's trophied tower,
Though filled anon, for me, from that sad
hour,
48 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Was empty still, and is, to this far day,
A sacred vacancy for thee alway.
I wreathe it now and then with memories
Of piercing glimpses out on star-lit seas ;
Of lunar shadows which thy mighty lens
Transformed for wildness into horrid dens ;
The fair, immaculate Moon, one night embraced
By starry suitor right around her waist ;
And once, such smutches on the Sun's face
lay,
We argued lightly, 'twas not washed that day.
One reminiscence, at my cost, I bring,
And pay it for the humor of the thing.
A royal vision for the night was set,
Conjunction, or eclipse, which, I forget.
"Come," said the star-king, "with your wife,
to tea ;
And, for the hour, sharp seven it shall be."
With grateful smile I gave my glad assent,
And through the great hall, as my way I bent,
I marked the clock with solemn tick, tick, tick ;
And, lo ! my watch had played an unwont trick,
THE TELESCOPE. 49
For it was fast a quarter to my sight,
Though with the steeple clock, at sunrise,
right.
I thought, howe'er, 'twas best to set it back,
That in my promptness there should be no
lack.
At just six hours and minutes fifty-eight
I drove my carriage through the Dudley gate :
My host was there, with graceful courtesy,
My wife upon the gravelled path to see ;
While, with a comic look, to me he said,
" 'Twas well I put the supper-time ahead ;
You're full twelve minutes late." I quick re
plied,
"That cannot be, your great clock shall decide:
I set my watch at noon-tide in the hall."
He laughed aloud, and made my courage fall,
Exclaiming with a glee I scarce can rhyme,
"Ha, ha! now, that's a joke, sidereal time." 32
I did not lose my wits, but got my turn :
" Sidereal time ! By all the stars that burn,"
5O SCIENCE IN SONG.
I answered him, "if ever I have seen time,
I vow 'that solemn clock of yours gives mean
time."
My gracious host forgave me my delay,
And I, you see, for gave myself away.
The starry visions o'er, I sought my rest ;
But visions not so real my sleep opprest.
I dreamed I lingered in the Dudley tower,
And round me felt a quaint, uncanny power ;
Tumultuous waves of star-lit ether rolled
About me, like blue banners pranked with gold ;
The Equatorial, on its ponderous base,
Turned its great eye, majestic, on my face ;
And, while I wondered what the movement
meant,
A murmuring whisper made me all intent :
It may have been the soughing of the wind,
But did not seem so to my feverish mind,
Which wove the whispers, by a poet's trope,
Into the ballad of the Telescope.
THE TELESCOPE. 51
THE LAY OF THE TELESCOPE.
Here in my tower, by day and night,
I keep my watch on the sky ;
But less I note in noontide's light
Than when the stars go by.
Three hundred years a long way back
On the path of fleeting Time
There fell faint light, on man's dull track,
From skyey vault sublime.
The golden Sun and silver Moon,
The stars and the crystalline sphere, 33
Swept round the Earth with murmurous tune
For credulous men to hear.
Had Claudius, the great Ptolemy,
My power and my uses known,
No false Astronomy had he
To the old ages shown.
52 SCIENCE IN SONG
I sprang from a Hollander's brain, 34
Though yet but a crude conceit ;
Minerva's story again
My birth may not repeat.
His dream by a Florentine sage
To grand reality brought,
I became the crown of the age
In which the work was wrought.
'Twas in sixteen hundred and nine
Broke first on the world my fame,
And with it a splendor to shine
On Galileo's name.
Then the skies began to unfold
Marvels undreamed of before :
The sage, through my tube, could behold
Space through an open door.
I laid the Moon at his feet ;
Veils from new planets I drew ;
THE TELESCOPE. 53
I brought, for his triumph complete,
Jupiter's moons to view.
My work grew in wonder apace ;
Round Saturn I cast a ring ;
But spots to find on the Sun's bright face,
That was the fatal thing.
The world was ablaze with my fame ;
Kings coveted me afar ;
But the spots on the Sun brought shame, 35
Like a cloud o'er a star.
'The eye of the universe blurred
With Ophthalmia's fatal stroke :
Such impiety never was heard ! '
And thus Enmity woke.
But the spots I multiplied still,
And errant comets I caught ;
Clusters of stars disclosed, until
They bewildered sight and thought.
54 SCIENCE IN SONG.
My skill has grown with centuries.
Little the Florentine thought
Of the grand celestial ministries
With which ray work was fraught.
In Herschel's hands I swept the sky
Far and wide from Afric's cape,
Reft suns and stars of their mystery,
And gave the nebules shape.
Some stars to double suns I split,
That whirl like prismatic tops ;
The Milky Way, I gathered it
In orbs like silver drops.
My huge Herschelian bulk I held
The uttermost of my pride ;
And, when to Rosse's tube it swelled, 36
What dared I hope beside ?
To-day a thousand hills are crowned,
Like fair Dudley's, with my kind,
THE TELESCOPE. 55
Great sentinels which sweep around
Wherever blows the wind.
We pierce the depths of outer space,
Flames of dying suns descry,
Track vagrant comets in their race
At random through the sky.
Another Neptune for your Sun
Barely hides in chance or hope ;
Yet, while stars glow and cycles run,
Fame crowns the Telescope.
56 SCIENCE IN SONG.
CARBON.
ONE winter night, within my curtained room,
Whence glowing carcel lamps expelled all
gloom,
And where a cheerful fire of cannel burned,
A tale as of "Arabian Nights" I learned.
I was alone, that is, with idle thoughts
Which followed fancies free, of clivers sorts,
When, chancing at the well-heaped grate to
glance,
My gaze was fastened by this circumstance :
In the red cavern of a half-burned coal
A shape so near a face upon me stole,
It seemed at once to feed my fond desire,
So oft indulged, for "faces in the fire."
The more I gazed, the stronger grew the spell,
And all the lineaments developed well,
CARBON. 57
The brow o'erhung a pair of lustrous eyes,
That only did not mate mine in surprise ;
Red cheeks and nose I could not wonder at,
The incandescent cinder answered that ;
Broad was the mouth, and from the lips, apart,
It seemed as if some glowing speech must start.
Perhaps I dozed, and dreamed, to think I saw
A jerking movement of the figure's jaw.
I know I stammered incoherently
Some sort of challenge, what the shape might
be.
It seemed to take it kindly ; and there came
A measured answer from the mouth of flame,
Which phonographed itself upon my brain,
And I can chant it to your ear again.
THE STORY OF CARBON.
What can I say for myself ? Do you ask
What's my name, my class, and my history ?
You set me, I grant, an unusual task ;
But perhaps I can solve you the mystery.
58 SCIENCE IN SONG.
My name, then, is CARBO, my family name :
I have others, I own, aliases.
Though somewhat plebeian, it's true all the
same,
I am commonly COAL to the masses.
Coal, that's not an alias though, by the way,
Just my old Latin name put in English ;
But at least half a dozen I use every day
I'm in too many jobs to go singlish.
I like to be frank, though it may not be
wise :
Perhaps you're a sort of detective,
One of Pinkerton's men in a poet's dis
guise,
Yet in that case I'll not be objective.
" Only a plain interviewer ! " ah ! then
I will tell you a very plain story :
I'm sure 'twill appear in gay colors when
You've arrayed it in typical glory.
CARBON. 59
My real name you know, but none of the rest :
I've told you I had many another ;
Perhaps, of them all, I like Charcoal the best
(That's myself, not the name of a brother) ;
Then An-thracite that's a feminine dodge
And Plumbago (don't go with a legion
Who think that's the pain so hard to dis
lodge,
When caught in the bleak lumbar region).
And then I am Graphite and Lampblack and
Coke,
So I'm called by the wise allotropic:
Why, sometimes I squeeze myself up in the
smoke
So small I become microscopic.
I could tell you of other names yet I use
In my manifold impersonations ;
And there's one (a stunner, I tell you) I choose
For only extraordinary occasions.
6O SCIENCE IN SONG.
Now, put your ear down while I whisper it
low,
The name of earth's jewel, the peerless,
I'm the diamond stone ; nay, start not, 'tis so,
And of doubt or denial I am fearless.
There's never a gem in the crown of a queen
But mine all its pride is excelling ;
And the love, hate, and strife which have ever
more been
Spent over my worth are past telling.
You marvel, and stare your denial at me :
" Only doubt," do you say, " that plumbago
And gems, of one common nature can be,
Or by alchemy, fused to it, may go ? "
Ah ! this is the secret you sought of my
"class;"
There is nought else so various in nature :
From lowly to lofty by magic I pass
To extremes in her quaint nomenclature.
CARBON. 6 1
One moment you gaze at the flash of a gem,
The next on a cinder you trample ;
Lift your thought from the dust to a proud dia
dem,
And behold of my moods an example.
In charcoal and diamond, I'm one and the
same ; 37
And both, by a mystic transition,
Inwrapped in the fire-king's ccstus of flame,
I dissolve to a gaseous condition.
I am Coal till the furnace transforms me to
Coke,
Having freed me by gas exhalation ;
I am Candle and Coal Oil till clone into Smoke
And Lampblack by slow calcination.
You sharpened your pencil this moment to trace
My words with its point on your paper :
In the pencil you used me on the paper's white
face,
And again in your luminous taper.
62 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Without me, your lamps, and the gas of your
street,
Were shorn of their white incandescence :
Of their light-giving force, aside from their
heat,
My atoms, unseen, are the essence.
My mission as coke is a marvellous share
Of the service to man which I render,
Where currents electrical flash on the air,
And flood his great cities with splendor.
He plunges me deep in a mystical bath,
Where the irresolute fire-stream lingers ;
Then I open between its electrodes a path,
And light leaps from the tips of my fingers.
Of the breath you exhale I'm a dangerous part ;
But I hide in the soil's secret prison,
And creep through its roots to the forest's great
heart,
Whose vigor through me has uprisen.
CARBON. 63
In my vapory guise, shrubs, grasses, and flowers
To bloom, verdure, fragrance, I nourish,
Till meadows and gardens and jasmine-wreathed
bowers,
And Earth's golden harvest-fields, flourish.
My stout " hearts of oak " ruled once the wide
sea,
Till Iron and Steam made alliance,
Whose strong hulls and keels wrested lordship
from me,
And hold their dominion through Science.
What more of me, pray, from my lips can you
learn ?
How the range of my services varies ?
How in earth or in air, wherever you turn,
I am shaped, and I work by contraries ?
What I do not, indeed, 'twere a less task to tell,
Than what I do and have done, the recital ;
Since in all Nature's kingdoms and domains I
dwell,
And through all I am potent and vital.
64 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE SUN.
FOR weary days I had not seen the Sun ;
O'er the chilled landscape hung the cloud-veils
dun;
And sombre faces matched the somberer sky,
Gray as the mists that trooped in squadrons by.
May's dainty blossoms spread their charms in
vain ;
H-er song-birds faintly piped, or hushed their
strain ;
And on the dreary scene the third night fell,
In gloom scarce deeper than the day's drear
spell.
That night I pondered on the power divine
That on the glad earth made the Sun to shine ;
And, ere I slept, a voice fell on my ear :
" From shroud and shade the morning will be
clear."
THE SUN. 65
The morning broke, and from the welkin's
face
Had vanished, of the murk, its faintest trace ;
And from my silent lips, as if they spoke,
The text of the inspired Preacher broke :
"Truly, the light is sweet, and joy is won
By happy eyes that may behold the Sun." 38
The text to me a rhythmic sermon preached,
As after its divine intent I reached.
Upon the landscape lay a scarf of light,
Wrought in the looms invisible of Night ;
On every flower there dropped a golden thread ;
The thrush a rain of liquid rapture shed ;
The dewy lawn .with diamonds was o'erstrown,
Feigning a wealth I dare not make my own ;
Yet had the glittering drops been jewels rare,
And I had garnered all the treasures there,
I had been still too poor the debt to pay
I owed, and owned, to Heaven that sunlit day.
It were not well, the sermon that I heard,
Plainly as 'twere the matin-song of bird,
66 SCIENCE IN SONG.
One only auditor should profit by,
And thousands lose a lesson for the sky.
I grieve alone to feel its charm abated
By the imperfect way it is translated.
OUR DEBT TO THE SUN.
Would you learn what is owed to the Sun
By the dwellers on Earth's little planet,
The account I've so rashly begun,
I pray you, attentively scan it.
That the bill is not small I confess,
But covers a great many pages ;
Yet consider, how could it be less
For hundreds of thousands of ages ?
Item first, is the sweet light of day,
With all its ineffable splendor :
Add to this every duplicate ray
That's sifted through moonbeams so tender.
THE SUN. 67
Ever since the Creation's high noon,
The Sun has illumined the plenum ;
And, making his mirror the Moon,
They've lighted our planet between 'em.
Some rebate, I admit, might be made
For occasional lapses in duty,
When for sunshine we've had only shade,
And vapors for visions of beauty ;
And, anon, for a seldom eclipse
(Though that is made up in surprises)
Grant a little allowance for slips
Of all sorts and seasons and sizes ;
Which, computed with uttermost care,
May yield five per cent to our credit :
You may make such an entry just here,
Or bear it in mind, I have said it.
Item second. When, wrapped in Night's shade,
We kindle the vapor bituminous,
68 SCIENCE IN SONG.
It is sunlight, for long ages laid
Close hid in the coal-pits, that's luminous.
All we turn to in darkness for light,
Metallic or fatty or ligneous,
Availing to put ghostly shadows to flight
With transfigured sunbeams, is igneous.
He who burns into midnight his oil,
The imprisoned sunshine is spending,
Still, to gladden man's pleasure or toil,
Its ungrudged munificence lending.
I confess there is something to pay
For sunlight transmuted to vapors ;
That it's cheaper to burn it by day
Than out of gas-jets and wax tapers.
But, the gas-bill and chandler aside,
We owe to the Sun's incandescence
The day long, and, while night-shades abide,
Each visible gleam of Light's essence.
THE SUN. 69
You smile ; and I take it you'd say,
With your look of complacent felicity,
"That is true of the past, but to-day
How much do we owe Electricity ? "
Hold there, my dear doubter, you'll get
No discount for dynamic splendor
From "Brush" lights, or any, as yet,
Which magnets and carbon-slips render.
You must prove to me first, that the blaze
Of the arc, or the white-glowing horseshoe,
Is aught else than of sunlight a phase,
An opus to which I won't force you.
I have done with the item of light,
And you'll own that the debit's tremendous ;
Which ever unpaid, it amazes me quite
The Sun should such quantities send us.
Item third, is the matter of heat ;
And a difficult matter I've found it
7O SCIENCE /AT SONG.
To arrange all its details complete,
With a ribbon of rhythm tied round it.
There's the heat that comes down with the
light
In increments lesser or greater,
That warms with the day, cools with the night,
And blazes about the equator.
You would easier reckon its force
If you lived in a zone that is torrid,
Where your figures to count it, of course,
One well might excuse being florid.
At far Guayaquil, in latitude two,
An iceberg would melt in a morning,
And the stranger dry up like the dew
At noontide, not under an awning.
What wonder that great glaciers melt,
And run down the Alp-sides in torrents,
When the breath of July, there, is felt
As he issues his summary warrants !
THE SUN. 71
Through fervors and frosts, night and day,
Yet ever with due variation,
From his photosphere blazing away,
We depend on the Sun's radiation.
And his heat, like his luminous rays,
Lies prisoned in ebony chambers,
Till, set free to temper our rigorous days,
It flames up in crimsons and ambers.
Item fourth, and the greatest of all,
Is our debt for the life of all living :
Only a clod a blank icy ball
Were the earth, should the Sun stop giving.
For the breath and the beauty of man,
For the flow of his blood in its courses,
For the play of his limbs, seek the plan
In the sunbeam's mysterious forces.
When the hills with their forests are green,
And gardens grow gay with their roses,
72 SCIENCE IN SONG.
All their exquisite vigor and sheen
The Sun by his magic discloses.
By his force in the wing of the bird
It soars in the ether with lightness ;
By his breath the dead lichens are stirred,
And gray crags are blossomed in brightness.
In the sea, in the air, in the sky,
Life glows at the touch of his fingers :
The shroudings of Death cannot lie
Where the spell of his subtlety lingers.
No dewdrop that spangles the lawn,
No gem on Earth's bosom that sparkles,
Not a splendor that flushes the dawn,
No storm-cloud at twilight that darkles ;
Not a bow on the storm-brow that's bent,
Not a banner of sky-tints unfolded,
Not a joy of the blue firmament,
But the touch of the sunbeam has moulded.
THE SUN. 73
To JEHOVAH be praise for the Sun,
Vicegerent and type of His glory,
Through whom Nature's miracles clone,
Shine out in the sky and my story.
If our debt to the Sun we would pay,
For all the grand forces of living,
'Tis a stipend of homage each day,
Unto God, with the song of thanksgiving.
74 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE STARS.
NIGHT reigned supreme. A cloudless sky
Shone with the stars' immortal heraldry,
A field of azure, soft and boundless broad,
Decked with the argent blazonry of God ;
The moonlight flung no pallor on the flames
Of the pure Pleiads immemorial names!
The fair Capella on Auriga's arm
Leaned in the splendor of her beauty's charm ;
Arcturus and his sons, from northward post,
Centred and sentinelled the glittering host ;
While through my soul a thrill of rapture ran,
The silent splendor of the scene to scan.
Each star a sun ! The lesson I had learned,
While o'er my youth their dazzling glory
burned,
THE STARS. 75
Filled more with wonder my maturer thought
Than to my boyish fancy it had brought,
While yet, with map and torch, from night's
blue field
I gleaned the scanty harvest it would yield.
'Twas later than those midnight starry raids,
When what I'd learned, I taught to star-eyed
maids,
And they, in turn, perhaps unconsciously,
Taught me terrestrial astronomy.
In the high hour supreme, of which I write,
There was no sharer of my raptured sight ;
I stood beneath the silver-studded sky,
And sent my solemn musings wide and high ;
With wounded pride, akin to pain, I felt
How ill the language of the heavens I spelt ;
How meagre more the harvest of my age,
I reckoned, than I did my boyhood's wage,
For torchlight toils and tears o'er Burritt's
map,
Fearing eclipse by some more lucky chap.
76 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Scarce could I then believe the stars were
suns,
And Earth's great light among the smaller
ones ;
While now I gazed upon night's wondrous gem,
The dog-star blazing in her diadem,
And, in its twinkling yet transcendent glow,
Three thousand suns, like ours for bulk, could
know,
And stretch its distance from my wondering
eyes,
Of time, two centuries, as light earthward
flies. 39
The stars possessed my soul, and, as I
gazed,
They held me in their glamour, sheer amazed ;
Their multitude my vision mocked, if true
How few the thousands in unaided view ;
While, in the crystal lens, to myriads rise
Their marshalled hosts that throng the living
skies.
THE STAXS. 77
While musing of their numbers yet untold,
Haply, a task for mortal powers too bold,
An old Hebraic chant my memory caught,
As if it sprang in answer to my thought.
The silence sang with it as 'twere a voice,
Scarce David's more had made my heart re
joice :
" Jehovah tells the number of their flames ; 4
And all the stars He calleth by their names."
The Psalmist's mood upon my spirit fell,
And thus I sang to them beneath his spell :
HYMN TO THE STARS.
Ye stars that mock our proud attempts to
number
Your glittering multitudes,
Shining in silence o'er man's strife or slum
ber,
Alike on Earth's thronged streets and soli
tudes,
78 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Our minds, untutored, marvel at your glintings,
Changeless from year to year ;
Or deem them, by some intuition, hintings
Of splendors breaking from some boundless
sphere.
With broader sense we grasp your great un
folding,
Each to a radiant sun ;
And sometimes, vain of our profound beholding,
Our folly counts your marvellous problem
done.
We grant you limitless extent and distance
Beyond our native earth;
And round your fulgent orbs, in vast existence,
Our faith to legion circling worlds gives birth.
We gauge your bulk and weight by boastful
science,
And sift to dusts your flames ;
To your dumb secrecy we bid defiance,
And catalogue in characters your names.
THE STAKS. 79
O stars ! I marvel, as ye burn and twinkle,
If scorn .is in your gleam,
To mark how we, the drops of light ye sprinkle,
Swell in our pride to Wisdom's ample stream.
We grope amid your hosts as he that goeth
Forth in the dusk to read :
There is but One your parable that knoweth,
Your light who kindled and its lapse decreed.
He who is infinite in understanding,
Whose vision knows no bars,
Since you He marshalled, and to your dis
banding
Telleth your number and your names, O
stars !
We catch, from whispers of His inspiration
By sage and psalmist breathed,
Some names His wisdom set at your creation,
When with your glittering fires His heavens
He wreathed.
8O SCIENCE IN SONG.
We know His Pleiades and His Arcturus,
And other primal names :
No temporal, vain traditions can assure us
How at your birth He called your glowing
flames.
O stars ! we know not aught of your high
beauty,
Save as revealed by Him :
Teach us, ye flaming torches, our true duty,
That, when ye pale, our light may not be dim.
THE COMET. 8 1
THE COMET.
IN eighteen seventy-four, when April's hand
Was scattering timid violets o'er the land,
There blazed upon the sky a bearded star,
First seen in France by Monsieur Coggia ;
And all the world was soon agog to peep
At the strange craft afloat on heaven's blue
deep.
A thousand years before, when o'er fair France
A kindred fire cast its untoward glance,
The frightened people and their frightened
king 41
Saw dreadful presage in the horrid thing ;
And prayers and masses, in the churches said,
Were aimed, in lieu of lenses, at its head.
The guilty Louis, in his conscience awed,
Spread monkish halls and nunneries abroad :
82 SCIENCE IN SONG.
The fancied perils had they turned aside,
Themselves, more potent mischiefs, still abide.
Four hundred years and more along the
track
Of Time, and History's page, if we look back,
We find the comet, now "of Halley" hight,
Blazing o'er Italy with baleful might ;
And triple-crowned Calixtus, King and Pope,
Saw danger to his thrones in its wild scope ;
Then, with all churchly rites of book and bell,
His awful ban upon the demon fell;
And from that day, in Rome's Cathedral towers,
Bells ring at noon, though peril no more lowers.
With larger learning, and with freer faith,
We fear no evil now in Comet's breath :
His genus through our solar system flies,
Scanned by a thousand telescopic eyes,
Close-questioned by our lenses and our prisms
About his age, his nature, and his isms.
And when one comes along, as Coggia's did,
Too big and bright from bare eyes to be hid,
THE COMET. 83
A milliard optics gaze into his face
To see a swifter than a Derby race.
I did not dream when Coggia's comet came,
But, wide awake, I hailed the misty flame,
And sung to that as hitherto had sung 42
Strange shapes to me with scientific tongue.
I breathed, perchance, some thoughts in that
address,
Which, pleasing him, may please you none the
less.
Its title, "Owed to Coggia's Comet," looks
As if I had some debits in his books ;
But all my debts are writ in books below :
I would it were the comet that I owe ;
For then some day my long account might
run,
Borne in his ledger toward the fiery Sun,
So nigh the day-god's superheated state,
I'm sure my balance he would liquidate.
84 SCIENCE IN SONG.
OWED TO COGGIA'S COMET.
Hail mute, magnificent, mysterious stranger,
Whose bright progression on the sky we
trace !
From what unfathomed depths art thou a
ranger ?
Ambassador from what celestial race ?
At least thou art an envoy extraordinary,
With shining train, attenuated very.
Though undisclosed, thou hast, I think, a mis
sion,
Coming with blazonry that frights the stars,
In whose grand hierarchies thy position
We dimly guess beyond bewildering bars,
On which we beat our scientific pinions,
Spent with far flight in limitless dominions.
Did Sirius send thee on thy blazing passage,
Charged with some secret for our sovran Sun ?
And, glowing with the zeal of thine embassage,
Thy flight grew faster till thy task was done,
THE. COMET. 85
And, from his august throne in pride return
ing,
We now descry thy backward pathway burn
ing?
Or art thou one of icy Neptune's neighbors,
Come up with tribute to his king and thine ?
I wot - his glance has quickened thy slow
labors,
And made the dimness of thy distance
shine :
For they must ride on dull and dismal pillions
Whose circuit miles reach twenty thousand
millions. 43
Hast thou been here before, as some conjec
ture ?
If but the truth to me thou wilt make known,
I'll put thy glory in a flaming lecture,
The credit thine, and mine the cash alone.
How I might laugh at all the learned doctors,
The royal institutions and their Proctors !
86 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Dost marvel that no more with ghastly terrors
(As in the past thy prototypes were seen)
We view thy face, but fearing only errors
In judging what thou art and where hast
been ;
How many ells of cloth of gold thy train took,
-And how intense its hues from Charles's Wain
look ?
Perhaps, since once a : comet scared Calixtus,
And prompted him to ban it with his curse,
Thy frightful spells were meant to have trans
fixed us,
Driving us trembling Aves to rehearse,
And with white lips, and knees that knocked
together,
Beseech thee not to spoil our crops and
w.eather.
i
A hundred years ago or two, we'll call it
Thou hadst not waved thy horrid hair in
vain ;
THE COMET. 87
In dread of direful dangers to befall it,
The world had stooped to "bell and book"
again ;
And on some papal bull or priestly chrism
Hung, half in doubt, thy solemn exorcism.
It well may be thou comest with pretension
To have a tilt with this old globe of ours,
And in our bosoms kindle apprehension
Of bursting bolides, meteoric showers,
Or, at the least, of most unearthly odors,
Of deadly maladies the foul foreboders.
We've had, indeed, a winter most erratic,
And something's out of order with our
spring ;
Fierce storms have lent an emphasis em
phatic
To prophecies of doom, for every thing,
This very year to fall, said " Mother Ship-
ton ;"
Though, thanks to Fate, the day she fixed
she tripped on.
88 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Perhaps thy train, of most outlandish fashion,
Got tangled in our atmospheric belt,
And stirred our sweet June zephyrs to fierce
passion,
Which we in waves of chilling breath have
felt:
If so, though with delight at first I saw it,
That gorgeous train, I charge thee now,
withdraw it.
But since we scan the sky with magic glasses,
Sifting their flames the tell-tale prism
through,
We boldly challenge each queer craft that
passes
(As now our telescopes are turned on you) ;
And be it planet, asteroid, or comet,
We seldom fail to get its story from it.
No dreadful dragon thou, red-ton gued and
ravenous,
To crunch our globe its fiery jaws be
tween ;
THE COMET. 89
A mighty mass, dim, dubious, and diaphanous,
Thy claims to frighten us are quite too
thin :
We'd quench thy fire, both manifest and
latent,
With one extinguisher of Babcock's patent.
I hailed thee "mute" in my first salutation,
And it is true thou hast no mortal tongue ;
But still thou bringest us a bright narration,
And dost " unfold a tale " both strange
and long :
A tale that twenty million leagues surpasses
Were a most taking serial for the(m)asses.
When first I saw thy gleams the welkin
spangle,
"A great celestial engineer," I said,
For thou wert laying out a vast triangle
With "Bears," both "Great and Little,"
overhead ;
"An elevated-railroad route projector,
Or, otherwise, a vagrant star-detector."
9O SCIENCE IN SONG.
I know not wJiy thou comest, dread visitor,
But wish I might have interviewed thee
first.
How proud were I to be the grand inquisitor,
Who of thy habits learned the best and
worst !
Why did I not enact the "Artful Dodger,"
And get ahead of that Italian Coggia ?
Speed on, great pilgrim from a clime uncertain,
'Tis best the Earth and thou, ungreeting,
pass,
Lest one least grasp should loose thy filmy
curtain,
And let it drop on thy disrupted gas.
Yet, if thou darest the shock, why, then, to
sum it
Up in two brief words, O Comet ! COME IT.
THE MARCH OF SCIENCE. 91
THE MARCH OF SCIENCE.
I MARK the march of Science far and wide,
Her brilliant victories won on every side,
Her trophies in Toil's methods, and her tools,
Nor fewer those she gathers in the schools.
With skill she moulds material force and form
To man's behoof in Nature's calm or storm,
And effete modes of mental gain inspires
With the hot glow of her fresh-kindled fires.
The farmer's golden fields her foot invades,
And reaping-hooks give place to serried blades,
Which sweep a hundred teeming acres o'er
For ten which tired his lusty arm before.
So, in the college-hall, dry classic roots
She moistens with the juice of ripened fruits,
92 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Fresh-plucked from trees of knowledge, rich
and rare,
Sprung from Earth's soil, and blossomed in her
air.
Old fashions fade from her triumphant track,
And few the murmurs fall to bring them back ;
For, in the realms of matter and of mind,
She bids us leave the "dead pasts " far behind :
A broader age of life she ushers in,
If not Time's age of gold, to that akin.
While thus, a scanty lustrum since, I took
Of Science-progress this enticing look,
I read (as who would not, while yet he might,
Read what the Cambridge " Autocrat " should
write ? )
A fair, fresh book from Holmes's facile pen, 44
In which one special lyric stirred me then,
Seeming to voice a timid, tremulous fear
That something vague and ominous drew near,
Advancing, with the pace of Science still,
The song-world with a silence drear to fill.
SCIENCE AND SONG NOT DIVORCED. 93
The poet of "The Coming Era" moaned,
And pictured Poesy's fair shape enzoned
In rigid cinctures, by stern Science wrought,
To crush her form, and stifle her sweet thought,
Until her beauteous soul from earth had fled,
And man's supremest joy with Song was dead.
I read and pondered, and a protest sprang
Out of my heart to what the poet sang :
To give it point, I fashioned it to rhyme,
Dumb to the world till some more fitting time
Should, haply, lend its measures force to prove
That Song and Science still must fall in love.
If I misdeem that timely hour is here,
Condone my error for my ready tear.
SCIENCE AND SONG NOT DIVORCED.
(A PROTEST.)
No, no! good doctor, in "The Coming Era"
(Which makes of your thin book the twen
tieth part)
94 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Your apprehension chases a chimera,
The Muse from her sweet bowers will not
depart.
Nor will she ever doff her lovely raiment,
Except to change its fashion, as do we,
With now and then, perchance, an eye to pay
ment
Of costs she never thought of formerly.
A change will come, alone, upon her topics,
And not, as you portend, upon her modes.
You'll have to rank, I fear, with the myopics,
Foreseeing dearth of epics and of odes.
She'll deal, as heretofore, in songs and son
nets :
But for all lovers she will rainbows choose ;
For maidens' eyes and curls, and "loves of
bonnets,"
Night-stars and clouds and sea-foam caps
she'll use.
SCIENCE AND SONG NOT DIVORCED. 95
She'll wreathe her garlands round the dryest
fossil,
Adorn with madrigals the trilobite ;
The tiniest monad and the moose colossal,
A sonnet this, an epic that, indite.
The lover and the maiden on the sofa,
The Muse's spell will feel and understand ;
And, as on well-marked map of old Fraunho-
fer,
He'll read the mystic lines upon her hand.
For frolicsome Thalia there'll yet be chances
To fling her idyls and her canzones forth :
She'll weave them of the weird electric dances
That flash and flicker in the frigid North.
In her deft hands your cruel vivisection,
The myths of Greece and Rome she'll re
create ;
Their genii and giants find a resurrection
In Science feats and forces wondrous great.
96 SCIENCE IN SONG.
And since she's ever done her best in fiction,
And fables found the fittest for her tongue,
There's ample verge for her delicious diction,
In Science dreams and fantasies unsung.
Room there for odes to celebrate Bathybius,
And render Huxley famous for all time, 46
Who fathered life, terrestrial and amphibious,
On the gray ooze dredged from the deep-sea
slime.
And Darwin's creed, that makes men tailless
monkeys, 47
May well supply the comic bard with themes ;
Though, had he set its bounds at human flun
kies,
'Twere plausible as now impossible it seems.
There's not a flower in all the old anthologies
That will not bloom for Science, like the rose ;
And modern notes they'll discount, sans apolo
gies,
On other banks than where the wild time
grows. 48
SCIENCE AND SONG NOT DIVORCED. 97
And let me quote to purpose, your example,
Which gives us Science in the guise of
song :
"The Coming Era " serves me for a sample,
Whose perfect verse veils a prophetic wrong.
But pardon me, my master in all metres,
I read again your rhyrnings, and behold !
In soul and sound alike they grow completer,
As I discern the riddle they infold.
The creed I chide, you give, I see, no credence,
But song forever shrine in happy hearts ;
And with your fancied heresy's decedence
My every dissonance with you departs. 49
Beyond the Iron Gate bid snows defiance,
And melt them with the sun of genial song ;
Blend the rare charms of Poesy and Science,
And Heaven your singing pilgrimage pro
long.
98 SCIENCE IN SONG.
THE OUTLOOK OF THE HOUR.
I PAUSE, while Science wooes me yet to
sing
Her far adventurous flights on sunward wing ;
Her patient quests where Arctic horrors bar
The daring glance that searches farthest
star ;
Her scrutiny in clefts and caverns deep,
Where fabled gnomes o'er treasures lie asleep,
But where her keen interpreter translates
Moses' old history inscribed on slates.
Above, below, within, without our globe,
Where lies the realm her cunning does not
probe,
Or, baffled or betrayed by first false view,
With final triumph looks the illusion through ?
THE OUTLOOK OF THE HOUR. 99
These unsung toils and trophies of her line
I drop reluctant, and of need, from mine ;
For with his song her round of fame to fill,
Till Earth's last hour, one must be singing still.
Not half the priests who in the temple stand,
Builded in beauty by the Eternal Hand,
Deny or doubt the revelation there,
One with the truth God's testaments declare ; 5
And fewer still the unbelievers count,
As purer knowledge flows from Learning's
fount.
The question more to moral issues tends,
Till in the spiritual the material ends.
Not yet the victory unto Truth belongs,
Yet Truth, who cannot speak with dissonant
tongues,
Who seeks with honest, humble, earnest soul,
Is on the path to her exalted goal.
The outlook of the hour the hope sustains
That Christian faith o'er doubting Science
gains.
100 SCIENCE IN SONG
The age is rife with theories, old and new ;
And false philosophies outrun the true,
But run so fast, they stumble on the course,
And fling their riders like an ill-trained horse.
The pride of human reason sought to find
In lifeless mud the potency of mind,
And made of slime, that sleeps in nether sea,
Source of all life, past, present, and to be.
Bathybius soared to Haeckel's credulous eye,
The germ of life, and grave of Deity,
Till in the subtle tube the oozy slime
Dwindled to gypsum from its rank sublime ; 5 '
And bioplasms, with that new god, fell
Down to the plane of a "primordial sell."
To-day there are whose wit and wisdom shape
Our manhood to the model of the ape, 52
And make our Newtons and our Shakspeares
fail
Of being monkeys that they lack a tail.
To such philosophers who would not grant
All length of tail their Simian theories want,
THE OUTLOOK OF THE HOUR. IOI
And let their Orang origin be plain,
By tails, and half the weight of human brain. 53
Yet, ere these numbers into silence sink,
I crave some lingering moments on its brink
To mark the drift of Science -thought, and
speech,
As these o'er continents and convictions reach.
A lively war, in which much ink is shed,
With heavy arguments in lieu of lead,
Some scientists and theologians wage,
And hottest o'er the old Mosaic page,
While furious skirmishers employ their pens
Too oft with immaterial "whys " and " whens."
The strife, prolonged to-day, yet slacker grows,
Though here and there fall thick and stalwart
blows.
The pity of this Punic war of words
Is that the flourish of their paper swords
The combatants to empty issues leads,
And makes the fight 'twixt theories and
creeds.
IO2 SCIENCE IN SONG.
These, and vagaries like them by the score,
Old fables, and new-dressed ones seen before,
Are man's vain dreams of truth all life about,
In earth and sea and self, with God left out ;
Whom though the lens and prism may not
reveal,
Beyond their scope through faith we know
and feel.
And Science, with this inward, upward sight,
Sees all the Cosmos bathed in Heaven's own
light.
New radiance floods the old Mosaic page,
Bent backward from our geologic age ;
And the deep problems of the Book of Job 54
Our modern knowledge shows us how to probe,
Until the BIBLE may of Cosmos be
Its oldest chronicle and newest key.
Men talk profoundly of the reign of law
That governs life and change without a flaw,
By whose decrees stars burn and planets roll.
The earth revolves, the needle seeks the pole ;
THE OUTLOOK OF THE HOUR. 1 03
The rainbow bends its beauty on the cloud ;
The pestilence for thousands weaves its shroud ;
The shrinking globe its granite girdle breaks,
Seas heave with terror, and the broad land
shakes ;
The tempest breaks the gallant heart of oak ;
The livid lightning darts its vengeful stroke ;
The rain, the drought, harvest and want, take
turn,
The bitter blasts that freeze, the suns that
burn,
These and the unsummed haps of time and
man
Are but the outcome, all, of Nature's plan.
Let us not cavil for an empty name :
This creed and ours may fuse into the same.
If for its law we the law-giver see,
The creed sees only not so far as we. 55
Pondering this problem in my mind erewhile,
Some taskless twilight moments to beguile,
I yielded to a grave poetic spell,
And from my mood evolved
IO4 SCIENCE IN SONG.
MY ORACLE.
Unerring law, that swings the earth around,
And whirls the planets in their lustrous
spheres,
Oh, tell me where the master-key is found,
That winds the mighty horologe of years !
On the blue heaven's resplendent dial glow,
In grand procession, countless suns and stars;
And we who watch and wonder here below,
StoOfi^
Fret with vain quest behind our finite bars.
The rhythmic anthems of the circling choirs,
Which fervent souls in happy trances hear,
To duller sense are but material fires,
That burn with splendor, but to disappear.
By whose behest wert thou, unerring Law,
Bidden to turn the tireless wheels of time,
Play Nature's marvellous drama without flaw,
And chide man's sordidness with her sub
lime ?
MY ORACLE. 105
Art thou, I pray, a self-existent power,
Though blind and dumb, yet animate and
vast ?
And dost thou own to none thy wondrous dower
Of life and force upon all being cast ?
VfUUi
Thou canst not answer me, for thou art dumb,
And yet thy dumbness shall my conscience
teach ;
Out from thy deep primordial glooms shall come
A fire to fuse thy silence into speech.
If thou couldst make and move the world and
men,
I could not wiser than my Maker be ;
Thou canst not tell me what I ask : so, then,
At thy mute shrine I will not bend the knee.
Thou art, I think, thyself my very quest,
The master-key that winds the clock of time ;
I welcome to my heart a sacred guest,
Who lifts for me the veil from truth sublime.
106 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Sweet Faith! I hear thee, and my soul believes
In one creating, uncreated Lord ;
And with thy creed my happy heart receives,
In rest from wildering doubts, its high reward.
My Lord, my God, who heaven and earth hast
made,
I mark thy hand upon unerring law ;
Now move the worlds in beauty's robe arrayed,
And from thy will and word their order draw.
No more my soul shall Doubt's disquiet know,
Nor grope in glooms which Pride and Reason
breed ;
No more to Earth's vain oracles I'll go,
Since Faith to God my thankful soul doth
lead.
L'ENVOI.
Science in Song ! Ah, if the song be meet,
Then Song and Science make a chord complete.
Not mine the skill this miracle to reach,
And wisdom in divinest numbers teach.
L" EN VOL 107
If less my aim, 'tis only that I know
How few the founts whence the rich measures
flow,
Their melodies with Nature's tongues to chime,
And with her Science make the song sublime.
When God His high creative power displayed,
And Earth's foundation-stones on nothing laid,
Nature's first anthem on the air was flung,
As all the morning stars together sung ; 5&
And shouts of joy for chorus rang abroad
From the glad bosoms of the sons of God.
All charms of Nature that the poet feels,
Whose loftiest ode no glimpse of God reveals,
Are barren yet of rapture to inspire
His soul and song with Art's supremest fire.
And boastful Science, which the space-void
sweeps,
But finds no Primal Wisdom in its deeps,
And hears no voice above the thunder's roar,
Has need its own murk mazes to explore,
IO8 SCIENCE IN SONG.
Lest fatal, more than ignorance, they betray
The proud truth-seeker into Error's way.
In chilling Doubt's, and Unbelief's, defiance,
I make this humble inscript of
MY SCIENCE.
Should Science tell me that my faith in God
Is vain, since God is not, nor any need
Of Him, then would I banish from my creed
All Science, and take lessons from the clod,
Which dumb and dead, like Aaron's budded
rod,
Blooms yet, by miracle, to flowery mead,
Where plain, as in the Holy Book, I read
God's power and wisdom painted on the sod.
Not thus has Science taught my grateful soul,
By starry gleam, or secret cell explored,
Nor bid me dash my foot against a stone :
She buoys my faith on all the tides that roll,
And tells me, if to loftier heights I soared,
In farthest skies, I should find God alone.
NOTES.
NOTE i, p. i.
" Not selfish Ime to serve, or vengeful hate."
The invention of "infernal machines,'' charged with such
destructive explosives as nitro-glycerine and dynamite, which,
in the hands oi reckless adventurers and anarchists, undoubt
edly exhibit "vengeful hate," even as the application of sci
entific principles in the dangerous adulterations of foods,
medicines, and other substances, affords proofs of "selfish
love ' on the part of all who pursue, or seek profit from, such
practices. Nor is it entirely true, perhaps, that science has
not contributed to the sating of " regal pride " or " warlike
greed " in new devices for war and conquest. It must be
remembered, however, that the application of scientific con
trivances to the arts and industries affords, equally with the
means of malicious and mischievous processes, easy methods
for their detection and defeat. There is, therefore, "no man
tling stain " upon the aims and achievements of science. These
are always honorable and useful, and all dishonor and abuse
109
HO NOTES.
of them attach only to the evil passions and greeds of evil
men.
NOTE 2, p. 2.
" And binds lone Neptune to the Sun's control"
The loneliness of Neptune in the solar system can be appre
ciated by the reader, only as he realizes that its distance from
the sun is 2,862,0x30,000 miles, or about thirty-one times that
of our own planet. The marvel of science, in the discovery
of this remote orb, lies in the manner of that discovery. This
was at first conjectural, and grew out of perturbations and
irregularities observed in the movements of Uranus, the then
recognized outermost sentry of the vast solar camp, irregu
larities which could not be referred to any cause -within Us
orbit. Early in the history of this problem, the existence of a
planet outside of Uranus was suspected by Hansen and other
astronomers. In 1841 an English savant, Professor Adams,
and M. Leverrier, an eminent French astronomer, began a
mathematical search for its place in the sky. In 1846 they
fixed upon a point within one degree of each other's calcula
tion ; and on the very night of the day upon which their
researches were made known in Berlin, Dr. Galle of the
observatory there, by the aid of the Berlin star-maps (not then
in the hands of the English astronomers), found the "suspect"
just where it was supposed to be ; and a grand trophy of science
was achieved, which fully justifies Arago's characterization of
it as "one of the most brilliant manifestations of the exacti
tude of the system of modern astronomy."
NOTES. Ill
NOTE 3, p. 2.
" The mad pulsations of the violet ray."
Estimating the velocity of light in round numbers at 190,-
ooo miles a second, and the wave-length, or pulse, of the violet
ray to be so short that it requires 64,631 of such pulsations to
make up an inch, the calculation for the whole distance trav
elled by the violet ray from the sun to the eye gives the amaz
ing number of pulsations as seven hundred and eighty-nine
millions of millions.
NOTE 4, p. 2.
" Till metals flash like suns in their profounds."
The temperature of the red ray beyond its bound in the
visible spectrum, or color-band, is so intense that platinum-foil
is instantly raised to brilliant incandescence, when exposed
to it in the focus of the electric beam, from which all the
light is cut off by passing it through a solution of iodine in
the bi-sulphide of carbon.
NOTE 5, p. 2.
" Plucks the weird force the chemic page that prints"
The violet end of the visible spectrum manifests low tem
perature, but high actinism, or chemical power ; and violet-
tinted photographs have been taken in the ultra-violet and
therefore invisible region of the spectrum of the sun, and of
the electric light. This result is due to the fluorescent power
of certain prepared surfaces.
112 NOTES.
NOTE 6, p. 2.
" With blazing breath they answer, ' Here we are ! ' "
" Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto
thee, Here we are?" JOB xxxviii. 35.
NOTE 7, p. 3.
" Or carbon candles, a la Jablochkoff."
One of the earliest forms of the practical electrical light,
and largely used in Paris, was the so-called " Jablochkoff
candle," which consists of two parallel rods of prepared car
bon, set upright, and separated by a slender layer of some
ceramic substance, which, while it keeps the carbon points at
uniform distance one of the conditions of steady light yet
fuses away in the electric arc.
NOTE 8, p. 4.
" A dollar for a thousand cubic feet."
The "gas-men" of Chicago have recently reduced the price
of gas practically to this low rate ; and, it our wide country
affords as yet no other instance of such cheapness, it is
equalled, and indeed exceeded, by the low price of gas in
London.
NOTE 9, p. 5.
" And swaying to and fro, like Bracken ivraith"
The spectre of the " Brocken " is a well-known phenomenon,
in which images of persons standing on the summit of a lofty
NOTES. 113
peak of the Hartz Mountains (in Hanover) are seen, as if upon
opposite and distant heights, imitating exactly the motions
made by them. The effect depends upon atmospheric condi
tions, mists or fleecy clouds, which at morning or evening
sometimes produce gigantic shadows of beholders.
NOTE 10, p. 6.
" I drew in a homely tea-kettle
The first storied gasp of my breath."
The familiar story that JAMES WATT (whose improvement of
the steam-engine in its early stages almost entitles him to be
called its inventor) was led, as a boy, to the study of the force
of steam by seeing and experimenting with the lid of a tea
kettle " bobbing up and down " upon the " hob " at the house
of his aunt in Glasgow, where he was visiting in 1750, is the
author's somewhat meagre warrant for this couplet, which,
however, may well help to perpetuate a possible and pretty
legend.
NOTE u, p. 6.
" The mightiest blmvs of Thorns hammer
I help his right arm to excel."
THOR was the war-god of the Scandinavian mythology.
His mace, or mighty hammer, with which, it was said, he could
crush mountains, was called Mjollner.
1 14 NOTES.
NOTE 12, p. 12.
" That crowns me Electron the Bright"
Electron is the Greek word for amber, in which substance
attractive and repulsive power were first observed ; and this
brilliant substance has given its name both to electric force
and to the science which describes its phenomena and its history.
NOTE 13, p. 13.
" Beheld me through lattice of amber,
Yet little he learned of me so."
About six hundred years B.C., Thales of Miletus, one of
the seven wise men of Greece, having rubbed a piece of amber
with a silk handkerchief, and laid it upon a table, was startled
at seeing light substances, as fragments of pith or papyrus,
instantly attach themselves to it. On taking it up to examine
the phenomenon closely, the effect ceased, but was easily re
newed when again he rubbed the amber.
NOTE 14, p. 13.
" Unstoried for eras I stand"
For nearly twenty-three centuries after Thales made his
observation on the curious electric property of amber, little
more of importance was added to this germinal fact in the
development of electrical phenomena than the discovery that
various other substances, especially tourmaline and the gems,
were susceptible of like excitation.
NOTES. 115
NOTE 15, p. 13.
" / ran, in the trance of my wonder,
Down the cord of a venturous kite. 1 "
The experiment of Benjamin Franklin in drawing the light
ning from a storm-cloud along the string of a rudely con
structed kite, which he elevated in June, 1752, into the lowering
atmosphere over the Philadelphia Common, is too well known
to justify more than this simple reference to it. It is claimed
that the process was actually performed by M. Dalibard at
Marly, in France, some weeks earlier than Franklin accom
plished it. But, if so, the French electrician was guided to his
fortunate experiment and success by a letter of the American
philosopher, addressed to Mr. Peter Collinson of London,
suggesting to the English scientists this simple means of test
ing a bold hypothesis ; which letter was translated and pub
lished in a Paris science journal, and thus made known to the
Marly experimenter. If he had not played with Franklin's
kite, as the men of Timnath in sacred legend are said to have
ploughed with Samson's heifer, before they could solve Sam
son's riddle, Dalibard would not have found out the great
electric riddle of the eighteenth century.
NOTE 16, p. 14.
" The touch of King Midas the Golden
Prefigured my work in the cell.'"
The fable of the Phrygian king, Midas, represents him as
rewarded for hospitality to the god Silenus by the grant of his
Il6 NOTES.
petition that his touch should transmute every thing into gold.
When it thus transformed his very food into the precious but
indigestible metal, he prayed for the withdrawal of the fatal
power. Many curious legends hang around the story of Midas,
but only with the primal tale is this note concerned. In the
process of electro-plating, the base metals and other substances,
even forms of wood and clay, are rapidly coated with gold, or
silver, or nickel, which metals are deposited from the solutions
of some of their salts contained in the cells. The object to be
plated is connected with the negative pole of the battery; and
to the other pole is attached a plate of whatever metal is to be
thrown down, and this dissolves as rapidly as its salt in solution
yields its metal to the surface to be plated.
NOTE 17, p. 16.
" In the great glass that from fair Tulse HilPs dome.' 1 ' 1
Tulse Hill is a pretty suburb in the south-west of London,
and in close proximity to Dulwich. On its crest is the unpre
tentious residence of Dr. William Huggins, the astronomer
and spectroscopist, whose researches in stellar and cometic
spectroscopy are world-renowned. At the time of the author's
enjoyment of his courtesy, he was using, in connection with
his fine equatorial telescope, a very powerful and many-prismed
spectroscope belonging to Mr. Gassiot, which divided the
sodium line to an apparent half-inch, and disclosed a broad
nickel line between its twin-boundaries.
NOTES. 117
NOTE 18, p. 18.
" With rapture for the pocfs eye"
Wordsworth says in familiar lines, .
" My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky :
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die."
And Campbell, in his " Ode to the Rainbow," says,
" Triumphal arch that fill'st the sky
When storms prepare to part,
I ask not proud Philosophy
To tell me what thou art ;
Still seem, as to my childhood's sight,
A midway station given,
For happy spirits to alight
Betwixt the earth and heaven."
NOTE 19, p. 19.
"And made the arrcnvy light-beam tell
The mystery of its mould"
It was in the year 1666 that Sir Isaac Newton made his
memorable experiment with a triangular piece of flint glass,
upon one of the sides of which he received in a darkened
room, through a small round hole in the window-shutter, a
slender beam of light. Passing through the prism, it fell upon
Il8 NOTES.
the opposite wall in a patch or band of seven colors, since
known as the solar spectrum, and these colors arranged as in
the rainbow. It was thus that the composite character of
white light was made known to man.
NOTE 20, p. 20.
" When some keen glance the hidden way
Into its maze divines."
In the year 1814 this was accomplished by Joseph von
Fraunhofer, an optician of Munich, who, combining the prism
with the lenses of the telescope, invented the spectroscope.
NOTE 21, p. 22.
" This one of Magnes holds the foremost place."
Excepting, perhaps, the one found in the " Arabian Nights'
Entertainments" (third calendar), in which is the legend of a
magnetic mountain which drew out all the nails of any ship
that approached within its influence. "The ship in which
Prince Agib sailed fell to pieces when wind-driven towards it."
NOTE 22, p. 24.
" For ages the vague veil of mystery."
From the observation of the electric property of amber by
Thales far into the Christian era, no important electrical dis
covery is noted, and until 1730 A.D. no scientific generalization
was made.
NOTES.' 119
NOTE 23, p. 25.
" O fatal halt, that sevenscore years held back ! "
The interval between Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the
solar spectrum in 1666, and the perfection of his great work
in Fraunhofer's observation of the famous dark lines in 1814,
was nearly a century and a half. About the beginning of the
nineteenth century, however, the " lines " were probably seen
by Dr. Wollaston, though not with discrimination enough to
make their discovery certain.
NOTE 24, p. 26.
" Two centuries late we have it, all the same"
In the foregoing note the actual interval between the experi
ment of Newton, which resulted in only a pure spectrum, and
that of Fraunhofer, which produced a striated spectrum, is
more precisely stated. The " two centuries " may be counted
from the seventeenth of Newton's great work, to the nine
teenth of our broad realization of the results which he only
inaugurated.
NOTE 25, p. 28.
" He sailed in fear the narrowest sea."
The introduction of the mariner's compass into Europe
dates back hardly six centuries, prior to which period, if the
directive property of the magnet was known at all, it was not
associated with sailing the seas. Some poet, referring to that
period, says,
I2O NOTES.
" Rude as their ships was navigation then,
No useful compass or meridian known ;
Coasting, they kept the land within their ken,
And knew no north, save when the pole-star shone."
The name of Flavio Gioia, of Amalfi, near Naples, is gener
ally associated with the construction of the box-compass and
the device of the fleur-de-lis, which indicated the north.
NOTE 26, p. 40.
"As lustrous Hydrogenium"
The metallic nature of hydrogen has been long suspected
by chemists from its curious re-action with finely divided plati
num, or platinum-foil, producing the incandescence of the
metal, and the ignition of the gas. Palladium absorbs this gas
very largely, and forms with it a decided alloy. Out of such
an alloy the Count Rumford medal of the British association
of scientists, at the Brighton meeting in 1872, was struck,
and determined approximately the metalline character of this
the lightest of all bodies, and the subtlest of the gases.
NOTE 27, p. 44.
" Decomposed in my volcanic thrill."
The absence of lines in the spectrum of the sun, which, if
present, would indicate the existence on that orb of substances,
which, abounding in our planet, we might reasonably suppose
would be found in the sun, may be accounted for by their
probable reduction by the fierce solar heat into lower and
NOTES. 121
simpler forms, an hypothesis which may hereafter find some
color of evidence by the eventual decomposition of supposed
earthly elemental forms of matter.
NOTE 28, p. 44.
" To flood them with beauty and bloom."
So very insignificant is the moiety of the heat-force of the
sun which our earth receives, that it is estimated at only the
one-half of the one hundred and thirty-eight millionth fart. If
there were duplicated earths strung closely together upon the
earth's orbit as a cord, the number would reach 75,000; and all
these, vivified and warmed by the sun equally with our globe,
would still not require a quantum of his heat in excess of the
TJ-iTnr part.
NOTE 29, p. 45.
" In motion I end or begin."
The new philosophy of heat as developed by Joule, Tyn-
dall, and 'other physicists, in accordance with the germinal
suggestion and experiment of Count Rumford at Munich in
1798, completely upsets the material or substantive theory so
long prevalent, and establishes beyond cavil the mechanical or
motion nature of heat, its perpetual energy in work, origi
nating motion, or resulting from motion for new activities.
NOTE 30, p. 46.
" Thy name, thyself, dear MITCHEL, to forget."
Gen. ORMSBY MCKNIGHT MITCHEL, director of the Dud
ley Observatory at Albany, as also of the Cincinnati Observa-
122 NOTES.
tory, was born in Kentucky, July, 1809, and died at Beaufort,
S.C., while in command of the Federal troops there in 1862.
Distinguished as an astronomer, and unsurpassed as a lecturer,
he resigned his professional positions for service to his coun
try, and died from fever, widely and tenderly lamented.
NOTE 31, p. 47.
"As, on the crest of Dudley Hill, I came?
The Dudley Observatory at Albany occupies a beautiful
elevation overlooking the city, and at only a very short dis
tance from it. Thither it was the author's happiness to go
frequently in the years immediately following its equipment
and inauguration through the beneficence of Mrs. Blandina
Dudley, and while it was under the superintendence of Gen.
Mitchel, whose fame at the Cincinnati Observatory had pre
ceded him at Albany.
NOTE 32, p. 49.
" Ha, ha ! now, that's a joke, sidereal time ! "
Between the solar day and the sidereal day, there is a differ
ence of length, amounting to four minutes, resulting from the
variation in the intervals occupied by the sun and stars in
their transit from meridian to meridian again. The star-transit
takes just four minutes less time than the average passage of
the sun ; which latter, indeed, is variable, while that of the star
is fixed and constant.
NOTES. 123
NOTE 33, p. 51.
" The stars and the crystalline sphere."
" The music of the spheres " was a conception of Pythago
ras, founded upon the old idea that every planet and star
was fixed upon a transparent sphere, which revolved about
the earth with definite velocity. The multitudinous motions
of these crystal spheres were the source of the imagined
harmony.
NOTE 34, p. 52.
" / sprang from a Hollander's brain."
The crude conception of the telescope is attributed to sev
eral persons, two of whom were Hollanders. One of them
was Lipperhey, and another an optician named Jansen. It
was from hearing of these contrivances that Galileo obtained
his impulse to imitate them, and the result was the astronomi
cal telescope.
NOTE 35, p. 53.
" But the spots on the sun brought shame."
The Aristotelian philosophers stoutly denied the existence
of sun-spots as an imputation upon the power and purity of
what they conceived to be " the eye of the universe." " The
sun," they said, "could not be afflicted with ophthalmia;" and
when Scheiner entreated his priestly father to look through
his telescope, and see for himself the spots, he was denied,
and gravely bidden to interpret what he thought he saw into
blemishes in his glass, or defects in his own eyesight.
124 NOTES.
NOTE 36, p. 54.
" And, iv/ien to Rosse's tube it swelled."
The largest reflecting telescope in the world. It was erected
by the Earl of Rosse on his estate at Birr Castle, Parsonstown,
Ireland, in the year 1845, at a cost of sixty thousand dollars.
This remarkable instrument is of sixty feet focal length. Its
speculum, or mirror, is six feet in diameter, and weighs four 1
tons.
NOTE 37, p. 61.
" In charcoal and diamond I'm one and the same."
The beautiful gem the diamond is pure carbon in a crystal
lized state, and differs from charcoal and graphite only in its
structure. When a bit of dry charcoal is burned in oxygen
gas, the sole product is carbonic acid (dioxide of carbon) ;
and when a piece of boart (a clipping of a diamond) is kin
dled to incandescence in a Bunsen-flame, and plunged instantly
into a jar of oxygen, the product of the glowing combustion
is only carbonic-acid gas. The dull cinder and the dazzling
Koh-i-noor are twin-sisters.
NOTE 38, p. 65.
" By happy eyes that may behold the Sun."
"Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the
eyes to behold the sun." ECCLES. xi. 7.
NOTES. 125
NOTE 39, p. 76.
" Of time, two centuries, as light earth-ward flies."
The distance of Sirius from our earth is computed at one
hundred and thirty millions of millions of miles ; and, the
velocity of light being assumed as 190,000 miles a second, it
follows that a ray of light from " the dog-star " would take
over two hundred years to reach our planet. The actual velo
city of light, however, is 192,500 miles a second.
NOTE 40, p. 77.
" JEHOVAH tells the number of their flames."
" He telleth the number of the stars ; he calleth them all
by their names." Ps. cxlvii. 4.
NOTE 41, p. 81.
" The frightened people and their frightened king"
The appearance of comets in the olden times, and before
science had demonstrated their tenuous and even filmy nature,
created great alarm among all classes. They were regarded as
portents of war or pestilence, and strange rites were performed
to avert the dangers they threatened.
NOTE 42, p. 83.
" And sung to that as hitherto had sung" etc.
The " Owed to Coggia's Comet " was printed at the time of
the comet's appearance (with now slight variation) in the
" Graphic."
126 NOTES.
NOTE 43, p. 85.
" Whose circuit miles reach twenty thousand millions"
There is a little poetical license here for the euphony of
the verse. The distance of Neptune from the sun being
2,862,000,000 miles, the orbit of the planet must be about six
times that distance, or something over seventeen thousand mil
lions of miles ; and the planet requires nearly one hundred and
sixty-five of our years to accomplish his " lonely round."
NOTE 44, p. 92.
"A fair, fresh book from Holmes 's facile pen."
" The Iron Gate and Other Poems," 82 pp., published by
Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston.
NOTE 45, p. 95.
" And, as on well-marked map of old Fraunhofer,
He'll read the mystic lines upon her hand."
JOSEPH VON FRAUNHOFER, an optician and scientist of
Munich, was the inventor of the spectroscope, and the first
definite observer of the shadowy lines upon the spectrum of
the sun as seen through the new instrument. Of these lines,
to the number of nearly six hundred, he made a map, of such
accuracy that its authenticity has never been called in ques
tion ; and while his six hundred lines have been multiplied, by
later observation with improved instruments, into more than
six thousand, Fraunhofer's map has not suffered the displace
ment of one of its original striations.
NOTES. 127
NOTE 46, p. 96.
" And render Huxley famous for all time"
Professor Huxley is the reputed discoverer of the gray ooze,
a peculiar slime of the bottom of the Adriatic and of the Bay
of Biscay, which he and Haeckel pronounced the ultimate
germ of all animal life. When the British Government sent
the ship "Challenger" on its famous mission for dredging the
deep to find this marvellous bioplastic deposit, and the best
chemists and microscopists of England tested it with crucible
and lens, and found it to be mere debris of dead organisms,
Professor Huxley recanted his unfortunate and hasty opinion
about it, and from that time " Bathybius " has been " a by
word and a hissing."
NOTE 47, p. 96.
"And Darwin's creed, that makes men tailless monkeys."
The modifications of Mr. Darwin's early views and infer
ences concerning the ape-origin of man, have in a measure
relieved that eminent physicist from the odium of teaching
directly that all men are descended from the monkey. His phi
losophy of life was, however, unquestionably based upon the
assumed absence of design in the origin of species or in the
development of living organisms. By this theory, the highest
intellectual powers of man have been evolved "by the agency
of the blind, unconscious laws of nature." If sciolists have
out-Darwined their teacher, that teacher certainly gave them
the keynote of their preposterous conclusions.
128 NOTES.
NOTE 48, p. 96.
" On other banks than where the wild time grows."
The reader will pardon the slight liberty the author has
here taken with the familiar words of Oberon, in " Midsummer-
Night's Dream" (act ii., scene ii.),
" 1 know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows."
NOTE 49, p. 97.
"My every dissonance with you departs"
It is needless, perhaps, to quote the last stanza of "The
Coming Era "to persuade the reader that the Harvard poet
does not apprehend the divorce of Poetry and Science ; but its
beauty will be to him a sufficient apology for its appearance
here. It reads thus :
" And so, in spite of all that Time is bringing,
Treasures of truth, and miracles of art,
Beauty and Love will keep the poet singing
And song still live the science of the heart."
NOTE 50, p. 99.
" One with the truth God's testaments declare."
It is an erroneous idea, however prevalent, that the ma
jority of scientists at the present day are atheists, or even
agnostics; nor would it be a difficult task to show conclu
sively that the numbers of these classes diminish rather than
NOTES. 129
NOTE 51, p. 100.
" Till in the subtle tube the oozy slime
Dwindled to gypsum from its rank sublime"
Dr. ERNST HAECKEL, a distinguished naturalist, and pro
fessor in the University of Jena, is one of the foremost of the
atheistic philosophers of Germany. He proclaimed the dis
covery by Huxley, of Bathybius, as being a widely extended
sheet of protoplasm covering the bottom of the sea, and as
containing in itself the essential germ of all animal life.
Bathybius means " deep-sea life," and is an ooze or slime lying
upon deep-sea beds. When this wonderful substance was
fairly subjected to the microscope and to chemical tests, it
proved to be sulphate of lime, which, from its solution, crys
tallized into gypsum.
NOTE 52, p. 100.
" To-day there are whose wit and wisdom shape
Our manhood to the model of the ape."
The extreme Darwinists have not yet all succumbed to the
force of logic or to the fire of wit, directed against their false
philosophy of man's origin. Against such the English laureate
utters his eloquent protest in that wonderful poem, " In Me-
moriam " (cxx. 3),
" Let him, the wiser man, who springs
Hereafter up from childhood, shape
His actions like the greater ape
But I was born for other things."
130 NOTES,
NOTE 53, p. 101.
" By tails, and half the weight of human brain."
Physiologists and anatomists tell us that the capacity of the
" brain-pan " in the lowest of existing men, compared with that
of the highest " man-ape," is as two to one : in other words,
the volume of brain in the monkey most like man is thirty-
four cubic inches, while that of the man is sixty-eight cubic
inches. Up to the present time a tailless monkey, or a tailed
man, has not been found as the long-looked-for " missing link."
NOTE 54, p. 102.
" And the deep problems of the Book of Job
Our modern knowledge shows us how to probe."
Probably no book in the Bible has been as much illumined
to the earnest student as the Book of Job, which abounds in
subtle references to natural phenomena, and wherein are
many questions to which modern discovery has furnished
answers. A translation of this remarkable book by that dis
tinguished Hebrew scholar, Professor THOMAS J. CONANT,
D.D., brings out in a very striking manner the significance
and subtlety of many of its scientific allusions, and will abun
dantly reward the student for its careful review.
NOTE 55, p. 103.
" The creed sees only not so far as we"
" ' God is law,' say the wise, O soul ! and let us rejoice ;
For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His voice :
NOTES. 131
Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can meet ;
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands or feet."
TENNYSON, "The Higher Pantheism."
NOTE 56, p. 107.
" As all the morning stars together sttng"
" When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of
God shouted for joy." JOB xxxviii. 7.
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