The form of application to the Cooper Union includes name of applicant, residence, age, occupation, name of employer, place of business. Parents or guardians, in the case of minors, fill out the blanks, but applications must be made in person. It only remains to say that the applications are in advance of the capacity of the Institute, but that the democratic principle of “first come first served” is rigorously applied. Applications do not hold over from one year to another, but must be renewed. It is possible for persons from any part of the country to avail themselves of the facilities here afforded. Board for gentlemen can be obtained at very reasonable rates, not far from the Union. Two rooming together and lunching at restaurants can live well at a low rate. Ladies also can procure board in Brooklyn, or in the suburban towns, or even in the city itself, at a rate far below what is generally supposed possible.
Passing the Cooper Institute, as the writer does nearly every day, he looks with undiminished interest upon the young men and young women who go in and out of the building; while to attend one of the lectures is a pleasure far greater than that of merely listening. If it were possible to assemble in one place all who have been helped upward and onward here, among them would be found men and women now in the most influential positions, and the intelligence visible in the countenances of those who, though still earning their bread by the sweat of the brow, are filled with elevating thoughts, and are consciously members of the aristocracy of intellect, would be an ample reward to founder, trustees and teachers, for all their work and labor of love. Nor is this all; these pupils will transmit influences through their posterity to the end of time. Peter Cooper, like Washington, Lafayette, and Franklin, still speaks “words of truth and soberness.” He shakes hands with every aspiring young man, saying: “My son, I will help you;” with every young woman who cherishes a high ambition: “My daughter, I have a deep sympathy with you.” It is useless to say, “Long may his memory endure!” It can not die.
In concluding this paper the writer must be permitted to express his satisfaction that the sketch is to appear in a magazine called into being by an institution which on another principle, equally efficient and much more widely diffused in the sphere of its influence, promotes the advancement of Science and Art by bringing them within the reach of all aspirants, without distinction of race, sex, age, or previous condition of servitude.
GREEN SUN AND STRANGE SUNSETS.
During the first half of September, the sun in Ceylon and India, and also in the West Indies, presented at rising and setting the appearance of a green or greenish-blue disc. Even when at his highest the sun appeared pale blue in Ceylon (from the other places no account of the sun’s aspect at high noon has reached me). On September 2, at Trinidad, the sun looked like a blue globe after five in the evening, “and after dark,” says the report, “we thought there was a fire in the town, from the bright redness of the heavens.” At Ongole, as the sun approached the horizon, his disc passed from a bluish tinge to green, which became tinged with yellow as he approached the horizon. “After he had set, light yellow and orange appeared in the west, a very deep red remaining for more than an hour after sunset; whereas, under ordinary conditions, all traces of color leave the sky in this latitude,” says the narrator, “within half an hour after the sun disappears.” These accounts, from both the eastern and western hemispheres, seem clearly to associate the green sun which attracted so much attention in the tropics early in September, with the remarkable sunsets seen in Arabia, in Africa (North and South), and throughout Europe during October and November. For we see that whatever may have been the explanation of the green sun, the phenomenon must have been produced by some cause capable of producing after sunset a brilliant red and orange glow, for a time much exceeding the usual duration of the twilight afterglow. The occurrence of the afterglow, with the same remarkable tints and similar exceptional duration elsewhere—though some weeks later—shows that a similar cause was at work.
Two points are clear. First, the cause alike of the greenness of the sun and the ruddy afterglow was in the air, not outside; and, secondly, the matter, whatever it was, which made the sun look green when he was seen through it, and which under his rays looked red, was high above the surface of the earth. It can readily be shown, so far as this last point is concerned, that matter at a lower level than sixteen miles could not have caught the sun’s rays so long after sunset as the glow was seen. On the other point it suffices, of course, to note that if some cause in the sun himself had been at work, the whole earth would have seen the green sun, while the afterglow would have found no explanation at all.
As to the actual cause to which both phenomena are to be ascribed, we must, I think, exculpate Krakatoa from all part or share in producing these strange effects. The appearance of a blue sun at Trinidad, followed two or three days later by a green sun in the East Indies, can not possibly be associated with the occurrence of an earthquake on the Javan shore a few days earlier. Beside, it must be remembered that we should have to explain two incongruous circumstances; first, how the exceedingly fine matter ejected from Krakatoa could have so quickly reached the enormous height at which the matter actually producing the afterglow certainly was; and, secondly, how having been able to traverse still air so readily one way, that matter failed to return as readily earthward under the attraction of gravity. Again the explanation, which at first seems a most probable one, that unusually high strata of moist air, with accompanying multitudes of ice particles, caused the phenomena alike of absorption and of reflection, seems negatived—first, by the entire absence of any other evidence of extraordinary meteorological conditions in September, October and November last; and, secondly, by the entire absence of any of the optical phenomena which necessarily accompany the transmission of sunlight through strata of air strewn with many ice particles.