The New Astronomy

by S. P. Langley

But the ox, the sheep, and the lamb feed on the vegetable, and we in turn on them (and on vegetables too); so that, though we might eat our own meals in darkness and still live, the meals themselves are provided literally at the sun’s expense, virtue having gone out of him to furnish each morsel we put in our mouths. But while he thus prepares the material for our own bodies, and while it is plain that without him we could not exist any more than the plant, the processes by which he acts grow more intricate and more obscure in our own higher organism, so that science as yet only half guesses how the sun makes us. But the making is done in some way by the sun, and so almost exclusively is every process of life.

It is not generally understood, I think, how literally true this is of every object in the organic world. In a subsequent illustration we shall see a newspaper being printed by power directly and visibly derived from the sunbeam. But all the power derived from coal, and all the power derived from human muscles, comes originally from the sun, in just as literal a sense; for the paper on which the reader’s eye rests was not only made primarily from material grown by the sun, but was stitched together by derived sun-power, and by this, also, each page was printed, so that the amount of this solar radiation expended for printing each chapter of this book could be stated with approximate accuracy in figures. To make even the reader’s hand which holds this page, or the eye which sees it, energy again went out from the sun; and in saying this I am to be understood in the plain and common meaning of the words.

Did the reader ever happen to be in a great cotton-mill, where many hundreds of operatives watched many thousands of spindles? Nothing is visible to cause the multiplied movement, the engine being perhaps away in altogether another building. Wandering from room to room, where everything is in motion derived from some unseen source, he may be arrested in his walk by a sudden cessation of the hum and bustle,—at once on the floor below, and on that above, and all around him. The simultaneousness of this stoppage at points far apart when the steam is turned off, strikes one with a sense of the intimate dependence of every complex process going on upon some remote invisible motor. The cessation is not, however, absolutely instantaneous; for the great fly-wheel, in which a trifling part of the motor power is stored, makes one or two turns more, till the energy in this also is exhausted, and all is still. The coal-beds and the forests are to the sun what the fly-wheel is to the engine: all their power comes from him; they retain a little of it in store, but very little by comparison with the original; and were the change we have already spoken of to come over the sun’s circulation,—were the solar engine disconnected from us,—we could go on perhaps a short time at the cost of this store, but when this was over it would be over with us, and all would be still here too.

Is there not a special interest for us in that New Astronomy which considers these things, and studies the sun, not only in the heavens as a star, but in its workings here, and so largely in its relations to man?

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Since, then, we are the children of the sun, and our bodies a product of its rays, as much as the ephemeral insects that its heat hatches from the soil, it is a worthy problem to learn how things earthly depend upon this material ruler of our days. But although we know it does nearly all things done on the earth, and have learned a little of the way it builds up the plant, we know so little of the way it does many other things here that we are still often only able to connect the terrestrial effect with the solar cause by noting what events happen together. We are in this respect in the position of our forefathers, who had not yet learned the science of electricity, but who noted that when a flash of lightning came a clap of thunder followed, and concluded as justly as Franklin or Faraday could have done that there was a physical relation between them. Quite in this way, we who are in a like position with regard to the New Astronomy, which we hope will one day explain to us what is at present mysterious in our connection with the sun, can as yet often only infer that when certain phenomena there are followed or accompanied by others here, all are really connected as products of one cause, however dissimilar they may look, and however little we know what the real connection may be.

There is no more common inquiry than as to the influence of sun-spots on the weather; but as we do not yet know the real nature of the connection, if there be any, we can only try to find out by assembling independent records of sun-spots and of the weather here, and noticing if any changes in the one are accompanied by changes in the other; to see, for instance, if when sun-spots are plenty the weather the world over is rainy or not, or to see if when an unusual disturbance breaks out in a sun-spot any terrestrial disturbance is simultaneously noted.

FIG. 48.—SUN-SPOTS AND PRICE OF GRAIN. (FROM “OBSERVATIONS OF SOLAR SPOTS.”)

When we remember how our lives depend on a certain circulation in the sun, of which the spots appear to be special examples, it is of interest not only to study the forms within them, as we have already been doing here, but to ask whether the spots themselves are present as much one year as another. The sun sometimes has numerous spots on it, and sometimes none at all; but it does not seem to have occurred to any one to see whether they had any regular period for coming or going, till Schwabe, a magistrate in a little German town, who happened to have a small telescope and a good deal of leisure, began for his own amusement to note their number every day. He commenced in 1826, and with German patience observed daily for forty years. He first found that the spots grew more numerous in 1830, when there was no single day without one; then the number declined very rapidly, till in 1833 they were about gone; then they increased in number again till 1838, then again declined; and so on, till it became evident that sun-spots do not come and go by chance, but run through a cycle of growth and disappearance, on the average about once in every eleven years. While amusing himself with his telescope, an important sequence in Nature had thus been added to our knowledge by the obscure Hofrath Schwabe, who indeed compares himself to Saul, going out to seek his father’s asses and finding a kingdom. Old records made before Schwabe’s time have since been hunted up, so that we have a fairly connected history of the sun’s surface for nearly a hundred and fifty years; and the years when spots will be plentiful or rare can now be often predicted from seeing what has been in the past. Thus I may venture to say that the spots, so frequent in 1885, will have probably nearly disappeared in 1888, and will be probably very plentiful in 1894. I do not know at all why this is likely to happen; I only know that it has repeatedly happened at corresponding periods in the past.