What the practical results of the study of the skies through this monster instrument will be none may predict. Theoretically it is capable of bringing the moon to an apparent distance of sixty miles. Under favorable circumstances the observer will be able to note the characteristics of the lunar landscape with more distinctness than a good natural eye can discern the outlines and character of the summit of Pike's Peak from Denver. The instrument has sufficient power to reveal on the lunar disc any object five hundred feet square. Such a thing as a village or even a great single building would be plainly discernible.
Professor C.A. Young has recently pointed out the fact that the Yerkes telescope, if it meets expectation, will show on the moon's surface with much distinctness any such object as the Capitol at Washington. It is complained that in America wealth is selfish and self-centred; that the millionaire cares only for himself and the increase of his already exorbitant estate. The ambition of such men as Lick of San Jose and Yerkes of Chicago, seems to ameliorate the severe judgment of mankind respecting the holders of the wealth of the world, and even to transform them from their popular character of enemies and misers into philanthropists and benefactors.
THE NEW ASTRONOMY.
This century has been conspicuous above all centuries for new things. Man has grown into new relations with both nature and thought. He has interpreted nearly everything into new phraseology and new forms of belief. The scientific world has been revolutionized. Nothing remains in its old expression. Chemistry has been phrased anew. The laws of heat, light and electricity have been either revised or discovered wholly out of the unknown. The concept of universal nature has been so translated and reborn that a philosopher coming again out of the eighteenth century would fail to understand the thought and speech of even the common man.
In no other particular has the change been more marked than with respect to the general theory of the planetary and stellar worlds. A New Astronomy has come and taken the place of the old. The very rudiments of the science have to be learned as it were in a new language, and under the laws and theories of a new philosophy. Nature is considered from other points of view, and the general course of nature is conceived in a manner wholly different from the beliefs of the past.
In a preceding study we have explained the general notion of planetary formation according to the views of the last century. The New Astronomy presents another theory. Beginning with virtually the same notion of the original condition of our world and sun cluster, the new view departs widely as to the processes by which the planets were formed, and extends much further with respect to the first condition and ultimate destiny of our earth. The New Astronomy, like the old, begins with a nebular hypothesis. It imagines the matter now composing the solar group to have been originally dispersed through the space occupied by our system, and to have been in a state of attenuation under the influence of high heat. Out of this condition of diffusion the solar system has been evolved. The idea is a creation by the process of evolution; it is evolution applied to the planets. More particularly, the hypothesis is that the worlds of our planetary system grew into their present state through a series of stages and slow developments extending over æons of time.
This is the notion of world-growth substituted for that of world-production en masse by the action of centrifugal force and discharge from the solar equator. The New Astronomy proposes in this respect two points of remarkable difference from the view formerly entertained. The first relates to the fixing of the planetary orbits, and the other to the process by which the planets have reached their present mass and character. The old theory would place a given world in its pathway around the sun by a spiral flinging off from the central body, and would allow that the aggregate mass of the globe so produced was fixed once for all at the beginning. The new theory supposes that a given planetary orbit, as for instance that of the earth, was marked in the nebula of our system before the system existed—that is, that our orbit had its place in the beginning just as it has now; that the orbit was not determined by solar revolution and centrifugal action, but that it was mathematically existent in the nebular sheet out of which the solar system was produced.
Other lines existed in the same sheet of matter. One of these lines or pathways was destined for the orbit of Mercury; another for the orbit of Venus. One was for the pathway of Mars; another for the belt of the asteroids; another for Jupiter; another for Saturn, and still two others, far off on the rim, for Uranus and Neptune. The theory continues that such are the laws of matter that these orbital lines must exist in a disc of fire mist such as that out of which our solar universe has been produced. The New Astronomy holds firmly to the notion that the orbits of the planets are as much a part of the system as the planets themselves, and that both orbit and planet exist in virtue of the deep-down mathematical formulæ on which the whole material universe is constructed.
Secondly, the New Astronomy differs from the old by a whole horizon in the notion of world-production. About the middle of the century the theory began to be advanced that the worlds grew by accretion of matter; that they grew in the very paths which they now occupy; that they began to be with a small aggregation of matter rushing together in the line or orbit which the coming planet was to pursue. The planetary matter was already revolving in this orbit and in the surrounding spaces. It was already floating along in a nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow adjustment got themselves into something approximating their present state.