the depths of space by the ascertainment of the sun's distance within
a three-hundredth part of that body's diameter. The existence of
a cosmic ether, a resisting medium, has been established, and its
retarding influence calculated. Many of the nebulae have been reduced,
and others proved to be in a gaseous condition, like comets. The
latter bodies have been chained down to regular orbits, followed
far beyond those of the old planets, and brought into genealogical
relations with these through the links of bolides and asteroids. The
family circle of planets proper has been immensely increased, a new
visitant to the central fire appearing every few years or even months.
Newton connected the most distant points of the universe by the one
principle of gravitation: the spectroscope unites them by identity
of structure and composition. Improved instruments have detected the
parallax of a number of the fixed stars, and traced motion in both
solar and stellar systems as units. Coming homeward from the distant
heavens, the advances of astronomy diminish as we near what may be
called the old planets and our pale companion the moon. The existence
of a lunar atmosphere and the habitability of Mars are still debated;
with, we believe, the odds against both. But the star-gazers make
their craft useful in a novel way when it reaches the earth. Upon
the precession of the equinoxes they erect a fabric of retrograde
chronology, and set a clock to geologic time. Here Sir Isaac is
brought to grief. His excursions beyond the Deluge are proved blind
guides. He misleads us among the ages as sadly as Archbishop Usher.
The profoundest of laymen and the most learned of clerics are equally
at sea in locating creation. That successive phases of animate
existence were rising and fading with the oscillations of the earth's
inclination to its orbit never occurred to him to whom "all was
light." To probe the stars was to him a simpler process than to
anatomize the globe upon which he stood.