Three hundred years ago, the sun, looking down on the England of our forefathers, saw a fair land of green woods and quiet waters, a land unvexed with noisier machinery than the spinning-wheel, or the needles of the “free maids that weave their threads with bones.” Because of the coal which has been dug from its soil, he sees it now soot-blackened, furrowed with railway-cuttings, covered with noisy manufactories, filled with grimy operatives, while the island shakes with the throb of coal-driven engines, and its once quiet waters are churned by the wheels of steamships. Many generations of the lives of men have passed to make the England of Elizabeth into the England of Victoria; but what a moment this time is, compared with the vast lapse of ages during which the coal was being stored! What a moment in the life of the “all-beholding sun,” who in a few hundred years—his gift exhausted and the last furnace-fire out—may send his beams through rents in the ivy-grown walls of deserted factories, upon silent engines brown with rust, while the mill-hand has gone to other lands, the rivers are clean again, the harbors show only white sails, and England’s “black country” is green once more! To America, too, such a time may come, though at a greatly longer distance.
Does this all seem but the idlest fancy? That something like it will come to pass sooner or later, is a most certain fact—as certain as any process of Nature—if we do not find a new source of power; for of the coal which has supplied us, after a certain time we can get no more.
Future ages may see the seat of empire transferred to regions of the earth now barren and desolated under intense solar heat,—countries which, for that very cause, will not improbably become the seat of mechanical and thence of political power. Whoever finds the way to make industrially useful the vast sun-power now wasted on the deserts of North Africa or the shores of the Red Sea, will effect a greater change in men’s affairs than any conqueror in history has done; for he will once more people those waste places with the life that swarmed there in the best days of Carthage and of old Egypt, but under another civilization, where man no longer shall worship the sun as a god, but shall have learned to make it his servant.
V.
THE PLANETS AND THE MOON.
When we look up at the heavens, we see, if we watch through the night, the host of stars rising in the east and passing above us to sink in the west, always at the same distance and in unchanging order, each seeming a point of light as feeble as the glow-worm’s shine in the meadow over which they are rising, each flickering as though the evening wind would blow it out. The infant stretches out its hand to grasp the Pleiades; but when the child has become an old man the “seven stars” are still there unchanged, dim only in his aged sight, and proving themselves the enduring substance, while it is his own life which has gone, as the shine of the glow-worm in the night. They were there just the same a hundred generations ago, before the Pyramids were built; and they will tremble there still, when the Pyramids have been worn down to dust with the blowing of the desert sand against their granite sides. They watched the earth grow fit for man long before man came, and they will doubtless be shining on when our poor human race itself has disappeared from the surface of this planet.
Probably there is no one of us who has not felt this solemn sense of their almost infinite duration as compared with his own little portion of time, and it would be a worthy subject for our thought if we could study them in the light that the New Astronomy sheds for us on their nature. But I must here confine myself to the description of but a few of their number, and speak, not of the infinite multitude and variety of stars, each a self-shining sun, but only of those which move close at hand; for it is not true of quite all that they keep at the same distance and order.
Of the whole celestial army which the naked eye watches, there are five stars which do change their places in the ranks, and these change in an irregular and capricious manner, going about among the others, now forward and now back, as if lost and wandering through the sky. These wanderers were long since known by distinct names, as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and believed to be nearer than the others; and they are, in fact, companions to the earth and fed like it by the warmth of our sun, and like the moon are visible by the sunlight which they reflect to us. With the earliest use of the telescope, it was found that while the other stars remained in it mere points of light as before, these became magnified into disks on which markings were visible, and the markings have been found with our modern instruments, in one case at least, to take the appearance of oceans and snow-capped continents and islands. These, then, are not uninhabitable self-shining suns, but worlds, vivified from the same fount of energy that supplies us, and the possible abode of creatures like ourselves.
FIG. 60.—SATURN. (FROM A DRAWING BY TROUVELOT).