Through Magic Glasses and Other Lectures / A Sequel to The Fairyland of Science

by Arabella B. Buckley

Fig. 16.

Fossil diatoms seen under the microscope.

The largest of these is an almost imperceptible speck to the naked eye.

"Is it not wonderful and delightful to think that we are able to add in this way to the power of our eyes, till it seems as if there were no limit to the hidden beauties of the minute forms of our earth, if only we can discover them?

"But our globe does not stand alone in the universe, and we want not only to learn all about everything we find upon it, but also to look out into the vast space around us and discover as much as we can about the myriads of suns and planets, comets and meteorites, star-mists and nebulæ, which are to be found there. Even with the naked eye we can admire the grand planet Saturn, which is more than 800 millions of miles away, and this in itself is very marvellous. Who would have thought that our tiny crystalline lens would be able to catch and focus rays, sent all this enormous distance, so as actually to make a picture on our retina of a planet, which, like the moon, is only sending back to us the light of the sun? For, remember, the rays which come to us from Saturn must have travelled twice 800 millions of miles—884 millions from the sun to the planet, and less or more from the planet back to us, according to our position at the time. But this is as nothing when compared to the enormous distances over which light travels from the stars to us. Even the nearest star we know of, is at least twenty millions of millions of miles away, and the light from it, though travelling at the rate of 186,300 miles in a second, takes four years and four months to reach us, while the light from others, which we can see without a telescope, is between twenty and thirty years on its road. Does not the thought fill us with awe, that our little eye should be able to span such vast distances?

"But we are not yet nearly at the end of our wonder, for the same power which devised our eye gave us also the mind capable of inventing an instrument which increases the strength of that eye till we can actually see stars so far off that their light takes two thousand years coming to our globe. If the microscope delights us in helping us to see things invisible without it, because they are so small, surely the telescope is fascinating beyond all other magic glasses when we think that it brings heavenly bodies, thousands of billions of miles away, so close to us that we can examine them."

Fig. 17.

An astronomical telescope.