One other spot must be noticed as among the notable things in this astronomical sanctum. It is the Chronometer-room, to which, during the first three Mondays in the year, the chief watch-makers of London send in their choicest instruments for examination and trial. The watches remain for a good portion of a year; their rates being noted, day by day, by two persons; and then the makers of the best receive prizes, and their instruments are purchased for the navy. Other competitors obtain certificates of excellence, which bring customers from the merchant service; while others pass unrewarded. To enter the room where these admirable instruments are kept, suggests the idea of going into a Brobdingnag watch-factory. Round the place are ranged shelves, on which the large watches are placed, all ticking in the most distinct and formidable way one against another. When they first arrive, in January, they are left to the ordinary atmospheric temperature for some months. Their rates being taken under these circumstances, a large stove in the center of the apartment is lighted, and heat got up to a sort of artificial East India or Gold Coast point. Tried under these influences, they are placed in an iron tray over the stove, like so many watch-pies in a baker's dish, and the fire being encouraged, they are literally kept baking, to see how their metal will stand that style of treatment. While thus hot, their rates are once more taken; and then, after this fiery ordeal, such of them as their owners like to trust to an opposite test, are put into freezing mixtures! Yet, so beautifully made are these triumphs of human ingenuity—so well is their mechanism 'corrected' for compensating the expansion caused by the heat, and the contraction induced by the cold—that an even rate of going is established, so nearly, that its variation under opposite circumstances becomes a matter of close and certain estimate.
The rates of chronometers on trial for purchase by the Board of Admirality, at the Observatory, are posted up and printed in an official form. Upon looking to the document for last year, we find a statement of their performances during six months of 1849, with memoranda of the exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air at a north window; the weeks the Chronometer-room was heated by a stove, the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into account; but after that, every merit and every fault is watched with jealous care, and, when the day of judgment comes, the order of the arrangement of the chronometers in the list is determined solely by consideration of their irregularities of rate as expressed in the columns, "Difference between greatest and least," and, "Greatest difference between one week and the next."
The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct, is the head-quarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which ignorance has still left among us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows: "I have been informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my inclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand who is to be my wife? An early answer, stating all particulars, will oblige," &c.
This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose arcana are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacks are copied. It foretells to a second when and where each of the planets may be seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years. The current number of the Nautical Almanack is for the Year of Grace 1853.
In this quiet sanctuary, then, the winds are made to register their own course and force, and the rain to gauge its own quantity as it falls; the planets are watched to help the mariner to steer more safely over the seas; and the heavens themselves are investigated for materials from which their future as well as their past history may be written.
RAPID GROWTH OF AMERICA.
Every one who visits America has something to say of the rapidity with which towns spring up in the West. Sir Charles Lyell, however, mentions some facts which remind us very forcibly how close to our own times was the settlement of the first English colony upon the continent. At Plymouth he sees the tombs of the first pilgrims, who came out in the Mayflower. Some of the houses which they built of brick brought from Holland, are still remaining, with their low rooms and paneled walls. In some private houses he saw many venerated heir-looms, kept as relics of the first settlers; among others, an antique chair of carved wood, which came over in the Mayflower, and which still retains the marks of the staples which fixed it to the floor of the cabin. He also saw a chest, or cabinet, which had belonged to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony. Part of the rock upon which the pilgrim fathers landed has been removed to the centre of the town, and, with the names of forty-two of their number inscribed upon it, inclosed within an iron railing. This is the American Roll of Battle Abbey. But to return to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony: Colonel Perkins, the munificent founder of the asylum for the blind, where we found our friend Laura Bridgman, informed Sir Charles Lyell, in 1846, "that there was but one link wanting in the chain of personal communication between himself and Peregrine White." White was known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom Colonel Perkins visited, in 1807, with some friends, who still survive. This Cobb remembered when there were many Indians near Plymouth; the inhabitants of the town frequently firing a cannon to frighten them, to which cannon the Indians gave the name of "Old Speakum." So that, in this case, one link is sufficient to connect men now alive with the first whites born in New England, and with the time when Indians were in the neighborhood of the first town that was settled.
As a pendant to this, we may mention something connected with the originals of that other continent which our race is peopling at the antipodes. A few weeks ago, we were dining at the table of a naval officer, well known in the scientific and literary world, upon which occasion he mentioned, that being off the infant town of Sydney, in New South Wales, in the year 1806, he ate some of the first home-bred bullock which was killed in the colony. The son of the first governor having just returned from the colony, which he had now made his home, happening to be of our party, added, that "since that time their progress had been so rapid, that this year they were to melt down two million sheep for their tallow."
There are three events in the history of the world which will bear comparison with this rapid extension of the English race. The first—and this has always appeared to us to be the most striking occurrence in history—is the marvelous manner in which a handful of Greeks, under Alexander and his successors, overran and held for a long period the whole of the East. The wonder is increased when we consider the difficulty of maintaining communications in that part of the world. They, in a great measure, changed the language and ideas of the East. The Gospel was written in Greek; and the law of Moses, the writings of the Hebrew prophets, were translated into Greek on the banks of the Nile. A Greek kingdom was ever able to maintain itself for a long period of time on the very confines of Tartary; and specimens of the Græco-Bactrian coinage are even to this day abundant in that part of the world. All this, however, passed away, and has not left any very obvious traces on the present state of things. The second event was the establishment of the Roman empire. Strongly as we are disposed to maintain that, on a general view of human affairs, every thing happens for the best, yet we may say of the Roman empire that it was in many respects a giant evil. No man of great original genius ever spoke the Roman language; in the sense in which many Greeks, and among ourselves Bacon, Shakspeare, and Newton, were men of original genius. There was a time when there were men of spirit and ability in every Greek city: there was a time when the Roman empire governed the world and there was not one great man from Britain to the Euphrates. Having fulfilled its destiny—which seems to have been the introduction into the Western World of the ideas of unity, law, and order, though unintentionally on its part, for it was nothing but a military despotism—it perished as it deserved, and its language is now nowhere spoken.