Recreations in Astronomy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Recreations in Astronomy.

Recreations in Astronomy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 235 pages of information about Recreations in Astronomy.

To what voices shall we listen first?  Stand on the shore of a lake set like an azure gem among the bosses of green hills.  The patter of rain means an annual fall of four cubic feet of water on every square foot of it.  It weighs two hundred and forty pounds to the cubic foot, one hundred million tons on the surface of a little sheet of water twenty miles long by three wide.  Now, all that weight of falling rain had to be lifted, a work compared to which taking up mountains and casting them into the sea is pastime.  All that water had to be taken up before it could be cast down, and carried hundreds of miles before it could be there.  You have heard Niagara’s thunder; have stood beneath the falling immensity; seen it ceaselessly poured from an infinite hand; felt that you would be ground to atoms if you fell into that resistless flood.  Well, all that infinity of [Page 250] water had to be lifted by main force, had to be taken up out of the far Pacific, brought over the Rocky Mountains; and the Mississippi keeps bearing its wide miles of water to the Gulf, and Niagara keeps thundering age after age, because there is power somewhere to carry the immeasurable floods all the time the other way in the upper air.

But this is only the Alpha of power.  Professor Clark, of Amherst, Massachusetts, found that such a soft and pulpy thing as a squash had so great a power of growth that it lifted three thousand pounds, and held it day and night for months.  It toiled and grew under the growing weight, compacting its substance like oak to do the work.  All over the earth this tremendous power and push of life goes on—­in the little star-eyed flowers that look up to God only on the Alpine heights, in every tuft of grass, in every acre of wheat, in every mile of prairie, and in every lofty tree that wrestles with the tempests of one hundred winters.  But this is only the B in the alphabet of power.

Rise above the earth, and you find the worlds tossed like playthings, and hurled seventy times as fast as a rifle-ball, never an inch out of place or a second out of time.  But this is only the C in the alphabet of power.

Rise to the sun.  It is a quenchless reservoir of high-class energy.  Our tornadoes move sixty miles an hour, those of the sun twenty thousand miles an hour.  A forest on fire sends its spires of flame one hundred feet in air, the sun sends its spires of flame two hundred thousand miles.  All our fires exhaust the fuel and burn out.  If the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five thousand years; and yet this sea of unquenchable [Page 251] flame seethes and burns, and rolls and vivifies a dozen worlds, and flashes life along the starry spaces for a million years without any apparent diminution.  It sends out its power to every planet, in the vast circle in which it lies.  It fills with light not merely a whole circle, but a dome; not merely a dome above, but one below, and on every side.  At our distance of ninety-two and a half millions of miles,

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Recreations in Astronomy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.