[412]. See Vol. II, p. 363, note.
[413]. As we increase the powers of the telescope we find that the number of newly appearing stars falls off rapidly towards the edges of the field.
[414]. The thrill of big figures is a feeling peculiar to Western mankind. In the Civilization of to-day this significant passion for gigantic sums, for indefinitely big and indefinitely minute measurements, for “records” and statistics, is playing a conspicuous part.
(Our very notation of number is ceasing to rest on sense-standards. Science has carried number, as ordinarily written, so high and so low that it now uses a movable base for its numerical statements. For example, a number in astronomy is written, not as 3,450,000,000 but as 3.45 × 109, one relating to ordinary experience as 3.45 (i.e., 3.45 × 100) and one in electromagnetic theory, not as 0.00000345 but as 3.45 × 10-6. Under this system the conceptual unit may be as large or as small, compared with the unit of daily experience, as the region of thought in which the calculation is taking place requires. And different conceptual worlds can be connected as to number [say, a number of kilometres brought into an order of thought that deals with millimetres] by simply changing the ten-power.—Tr.)
[415]. In stellar calculations even the mean radius of the earth’s orbit (1.493 × 1013 cm.) hardly suffices as unit, as the distance of a star of one second parallax is already 206,265 such units away from us; star-distances are reckoned therefore either in light-years or in terms of the unit distance of a star of this standard parallax.—Tr.
[416]. As early as the second millennium before Christ they worked from Iceland and the North Sea past Finisterre to the Canaries and West Africa. An echo of these voyagings lingers in the Atlantis-saga of the Greeks. The realm of Tartessus (at the mouth of the Guadalquivir) appears to have been a centre of these movements (see Leo Frobenius, Das unbekannte Afrika, p. 139). Some sort of relation, too, there must have been between them and the movements of the “sea peoples,” Viking swarms which after long land-wanderings from North to South built themselves ships again on the Black Sea or the Ægean and burst out against Egypt from the time of Rameses II (1292-1225). The Egyptian reliefs show their ship-types to have been quite different from the native and the Phœnician; but they may well have been similar to those that Cæsar found afterwards among the Veneti of Brittany. A later example of such outbursts is afforded by the Varyags or Varangians in Russia and at Constantinople. No doubt more light will shortly be thrown on the courses of these movement-streams.
[417]. Here there is no need to postulate firearms (as distinct from gunpowder used in fireworks) in the Chinese Culture. The archery of the Chinese and Japanese was such as only the British 14th-century archery could match in the Western and nothing in the Classical.
It should be noted also that it was in our 14th Century that—quite independently of gunpowder[gunpowder]—archery and the construction of siege-engines reached their zenith in the West. The “English” bow had long been used by the Welsh, but it was left to Edward I and Edward III to make it the tactical weapon par excellence.—Tr.