UNIVERSITY

OF

CALIFORNIA

The Romance of Astronomy.

THE Romance of Astronomy strikes one at first as sounding something very like a contradiction in terms. We might naturally be inclined to think that there is about as much of romance in astronomy as there is of poetic fire in Martin Tupper, or of charity in a Saturday Reviewer. Any one listening to the conversation of two astronomers, and hearing them descanting enthusiastically about perigees, apogees, and syzygies, right ascensions and declinations, precession of the equinoxes, and the longitude of the moon's ascending node; or any one opening at random the pages of a work on the science, and finding an incomprehensible mass of calculations, formulæ extending over twenty lines and using up all the letters of two or three alphabets,

B

and diagrams like nothing in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, and only bearing a very faint resemblance to things in heaven above; any one we repeat, on getting such an introduction to the subject, would be very much tempted to think that romance and astronomy were altogether incompatible. Science is said by rhetoricians to be the logical opposite of poetry, and whence then can come any element of romance into the sternest and loftiest of the sciences?

But if we consider not so much the study of the science itself, in its profound and recondite details, as the results to which it attains, the magnitude and importance of the subjects it treats of, and the beauty and grandeur of the phenomena it investigates, we shall have to acknowledge that somewhere or other in the ponderous tomes of astronomical science there must lie entombed rich stores of novel and unwonted interest. The science which fathoms the infinite and reckons up the eternal, which pierces the abysses of space, grasps the orb which we see now by the light that left it eighty thousand years ago, measures its distance, and

traces its movements-the science which accomplishes such marvels as these, and the history of the great men who achieved these noblest triumphs

of human intellect-must surely furnish many themes and contain many episodes of a character as wonderful and as truly romantic as we can find within the airy realms of fiction or of poetry. And besides the grandeur of the phenomena of astronomy and the romance which gathers round its history in all ages and casts a brilliant gleam here and there upon its sober annals, there often flashes even across the pages of the driest and most mathematical parts of the subject a glimpse of strange and unexpected interest; and a fact here and a figure there will start the mind in a train of fresh and novel speculation, and set the fancy to luxuriate in new and untrodden realms. Many of these points moreover to which we allude, though very interesting and wonderful in themselves, are yet of comparatively little importance from an astronomical point of view; their interest centres in themselves, and the results to which they lead must be regarded as rather curious than valuable; and hence they are but little to be met with in books, or if touched upon at all, are soon abandoned with the remark that it is time to quit such regions of endless and unavailing speculation. Now some of these speculations we purpose following out a little to their legitimate conclusions, trusting that from the

above reason they may prove new to many of our readers. And in the other points which we take up-for we must not confine ourselves to so limited a portion of the romance of astronomy as this alone we shall seek to select those which are likely to prove at once the most striking and the least familiar to non-scientific readers.