Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space; Venus has become a celestial Earth, our sister and neighbour, and the better-informed eyes which contemplate it to-day see in her, not, like Homer and Manilius, a luminous point shining above our heads and controlling the feelings of our hearts and the movement of our blood, but a world corresponding to the world we ourselves inhabit, gravitating like us round the same sun, living on the same light and heat, and fit like ours to bear a thinking race for whom the Earth we inhabit is itself a star in the sky.
Venus, the brightest star which ever shines in the limpid glory of the western sky, is not a star, strictly speaking; it is a planet, a world like ours, and of the same size, which only shines by reflecting the Sun’s light into space. When one remembers that it is the same with us, and that, seen from the distance of some ten million miles, our Earth shines with a similar lustre, one is forced to admit that we are much more beautiful from afar than we are close by.
There is indeed no possible comparison between the two aspects. Seen close at hand, we are agitation, the struggle for existence, fight, battle, envy, jealousy, drama, hunger, often misery; seen from afar, we are calm, serenity, pure nobility, celestial light, almost an image of God! It is probably the same with Venus, so white and so radiant seen from here; possibly if we could go close to her, we should hear the cries of wild beasts in the forests, the battles of men devouring each other in so-called civilised lands, and we might witness geological and human revolutions, more formidable on account of the fact that Venus, younger than ourselves, is less advanced in evolution.
Being nearer the Sun than we and enveloped in a very dense atmosphere, Venus must have a higher temperature than the Earth. Its atmosphere is heavily charged with hot vapours. Its sky is always overcast; thunder and lightning must be never-ending. Electricity plays no doubt a prominent part. But, although many things are imperfect, there is good everywhere.
It is one of the charms of astronomy that it enables us to see through time as well as through space. Those who remain in ignorance of the elements of this science do not even know that they are depriving themselves of the most agreeable satisfactions of the mind. They are like travellers who pass through a wonderful landscape without even asking where they are. This planet consecrated to Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, who, in the days of ancient Greece, was said to have emerged from the waves to charm gods and men, and whose mythical history brings us such eloquent evidence of the influence of celestial aspects upon the origin of religions—this planet, we say, owes its terrestrial glory to its situation between the Earth and the Sun. While our globe gravitates round the Sun at the distance of 92 million miles, in a year of 365 days, Venus passes along the orbit contained within our own, at the distance of 65 million miles from the Sun, in a year numbering 225 days.
It follows that from time to time it passes between the Sun and ourselves, approaching to within 25 million miles or even less, since the two orbits are not circular, but elliptical.
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One of the finest achievements of astronomy is having made man a citizen of the heavens. The planet which we inhabit is a heavenly body, just as is Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, and far from occupying the centre of creation, it lies in the depths of infinite space as do the most distant stars of the Milky Way. Venus possesses no more light of her own than does the Earth; she simply receives the rays of the Sun and sheds them into space as the Moon does. Take, for instance, a small finder telescope and direct it towards Venus; you will see the form of a crescent. It is no longer Venus, but Diana. Take a rather more powerful telescope, and you will see that the border of this crescent is not regular, and the southern pole is blunted and rounded, while the northern pole is pointed. On increasing the power of your instrument you will perceive the atmosphere by the gradual transition between the illuminated hemisphere and the dark hemisphere, or by the blinding clouds and light shadows which fleck its disc.
If you go still farther and give yourself the pains and the pleasure of doing a few astronomical calculations, you will see that the diameter of its globe is just the same as that of the Earth—within one thousandth part!—but that Venus is a little lighter than the Earth, its density being only four-fifths of ours, whence it results that objects weigh a little less on its surface than they would on ours: 1,000 grammes transported on Venus would only weigh 880 grammes; on Mars they would weigh even less, viz. 376 grammes; and even less on the Moon, viz. 165 grammes. We are very heavy down here.
Astronomy alone teaches us that this young sister of ours is in communication with us, not only by means of light, but also by attraction, and that space, so far from being a separation between worlds, is a real link, an invisible hyphen. For example, when the distance between us and Venus is 25 million miles, light only takes 2½ minutes to cross that distance. Is that a serious separation? Even in France a telegram, in spite of its name, takes more than an hour to be delivered a few hundred miles away, on account of intermediate links. If astronomers ever succeeded in establishing celestial telegraphy, communication would be much more rapid between one world and another than between one part of modern Babylon and another. An interplanetary telephone would be almost instantaneous.