DR. NICHOL’S Architecture of the Heavens.

The form of this admirable work is that of letters to a lady. Its object is to popularize the stupendous wonders that have been discovered in astronomy, (and chiefly by the elder Herschel,) during the present century; and which, enveloped in dry or extraneous matter, have hitherto remained buried amid “the varied and massive collections of our learned societies.” The subjects of the work, are—the form of the existing universe, and the firmaments of which it consists; the mechanism, or vital principle of the stellar arrangements; and the origin and probable destiny of the present form of the material creation. In accompanying Dr. Nichol through these three divisions of astronomy, the reader will have impressed upon him the infinity of space; and the eternity of time, if that can be called time which hints no idea of a beginning, no prospect of an end. He will also be made to feel the stupendous magnitude of a universe—where planetary worlds are beyond sight and beneath regard; where the nearest suns—suns like ours,

“The light and life Of all this wondrous world we see”—

are reckoned by millions; whilst millions upon millions of the remotest, blended together by the incalculable distance, merely give out a dim nebulous light to the most powerful telescope, until the mind, overwhelmed by the vastness of creation, is crushed by the sense of its own insignificance, as well as of that of the “great globe and all which it inherit.”

Some feeling akin to this is felt by the reviewer, who with limited space, and a skill and a knowledge inferior to Dr. Nichol, approaches the Architecture of the Heavens. And perhaps the best mode of conveying an idea of the volume and its contents, will be to describe the character and nature of its leading subjects, and then allow the author to speak for himself in a few, of necessity, isolated extracts.

Stripping it of all secondary matter, “Firmaments” is the subject of Dr. Nichol’s First Part,—meaning by firmament, not our solar system, but the whole stellar system, of which our sun and his attendant planets form a very insignificant part. The firmament in which we move and have our being, is the part of the heavens called the Milky Way, and contains from eight to ten millions of stars or suns. Its internal shape can be readily understood, by supposing a long oblong strip of space, like a breadth of cloth, partially dividing at one end something like the letter Y, and studded with innumerable spots. Its elevation, or form, as seen by one looking at it from the outside, may be compared in shape to a cheese or grindstone, partially cloven, so as to have for a little space on the rim two distinct cheeks, which speedily unite again. And the reader can easily comprehend that any one within, and looking either up or down the star-studded strip, would see little save stars, but that, on turning his vision to either side, he would look into the immeasurable infinity of space. Up to the beginning of the present century, this circumstance was disregarded or unknown, when the mighty genius of the elder Herschel, aided by his mechanical improvements in the telescope, enabled him and his followers to traverse a portion of space, and there to discover many firmaments of various forms, grander and more glorious than our Milky Way. No attempt to reckon their numbers in the Southern Hemisphere appears yet to have been made. In the Northern, “after making all allowances, those whose places are fixed cannot be fewer than between one and two thousand.” And, what is truly “perhaps the strangest and most unexpected circumstance which modern astronomy has revealed,” on the confines of penetrable space, just visible on the outermost range of telescopic observation, though too distant to be as yet resolvable into distinct stars, hangs a facsimile of our firmament—a double of our Milky Way; containing, perhaps, another sun and another earth, (for the human mind, amidst the loftiest grandeur or the most gigantic vastness, still reverts to the home and the familiar,) and offering a more singular speculation than the circular system of some philosophers—that of a counterpart existence to every thing in this world. What a thought—strange, yet comforting—that, at a distance before which the combined powers of computation and fancy totally fail, each of us has a double, acting, thinking, feeling, loving, suffering as we do, and from the same exciting causes. Fancy that there should have been two Homers, two Shakspeares, two Miltons, two Newtons! and that whilst the astronomer was pointing his telescope and straining his vision through remotest space, to spy out new firmaments, a brother eye was crossing his on a similar errand!

Passing the Second Part with the remarks that the mode of doubles and even trebles seems to obtain pretty extensively throughout the stellar system, so far as human sense and intelligence have examined it; and that the law by which the whole of the firmaments, with their myriad suns and countless worlds, have been formed, are maintained, and will perhaps finally be destroyed, is the uniform and the simple one revealed to us by Newton—the law of gravitation; we proceed to Part the Third. This, substantially, treats of the existing formation of new worlds, and of the manner in which the Milky Way, including our sun and planets, were probably formed. Whilst reading the Universe, the telescopic eye of Herschel often encountered a faint shining substance, sometimes resolvable into individual stars on the application of a more powerful glass, and sometimes not. His first inference, which he maintained for a long time, was that this cloudy appearance arose from the extreme distance of the mass; but at last he noted a star with a dim atmosphere around it. “The star,” he writes in his observation, “is perfectly in the centre; and the atmosphere so diluted, faint, and equal throughout, that there can be no surmise of its consisting of stars.” The train of reasoning by which he arrived at this conclusion is so cogent in itself, and such a specimen of the higher class of astronomical argument, that we give it with Dr. Nichol’s commentary.

“‘In the first place,’ says he, ‘if the nebulosity consists of stars appearing nebulous because of their distance, which causes them to run into each other, what must be the size of the central body which, at so enormous a distance, so far outshines all the rest? In the next place, if the central star be no bigger than common, how very small and compressed must be the other luminous points which send us only so faint a light? In the former case, the central body would far exceed what we call a star; and in the latter, the shining matter about the centre would be too small to come under that designation. Either, then, we have a central body which is not a star, or a star involved in a shining fluid of a nature wholly unknown to us.’ The latter alternative may, at first sight, appear the strangest and the most remote, yet it is the one to which the balance of probability manifestly inclines. And our judgment rests upon this: the nebulous fluid, supposing it to exist, could not become known under any other aspect or modification; while, if stars of enormous comparative dimensions were scattered through space, the likelihood is, that some one such body would be sufficiently near us to permit of our recognizing it under less ambiguous characters.”

Many facts and further examinations both by himself and others confirm the existence of these nebulae, or matter in its pristine state. Beyond this all is conjecture, but the conjecture of genius and science. It would seem that in space, not only suns and worlds, but firmaments themselves, are in the course of gradual formation; some having so far advanced, that suns exist, like the star which laid the foundation of Herschel’s conclusions, with embryo suns around them, whilst others are still in a nebulous state. Gravitation is the means by which this pristine matter is drawn together: the probable cause of the rotatory motion of these condensing bodies was deduced by Herschel. Observing that when currents of water meet, however gently, a dimple or whirlpool is produced, the ever quick and reflective mind of the philosopher detected in this every-day example the mechanical law by which the sun was driven to revolve upon his axis; and as each successive addition to the whirling mass must increase the speed of its revolution, the wonderful swiftness of the solar motion is readily explainable. But though this theory may account for the sun, we know that our system, and by inference all the rest, consists of a central luminary, with revolving planets; and whence came they? The answer has been given by the conjectural induction of Laplace. The cohesion of a revolving body depends on the “circumstance, that the centrifugal force is not greater than the power of the central attraction.” If, from any cause, this balance of forces is destroyed in favour of the centrifugal, some of the parts will be thrown off; as “a grindstone,” for example, “may be made to revolve with sufficient rapidity to cause its whole rim to split in pieces.” “Now, if the rim, instead of being formed of brittle stone, had consisted of an elastic belt, say of caoutchouc, what would have resulted in such a case? Clearly, a separation of the rim from the mass of the rotatory body—it would have expanded somewhat, just as the orbit of a planet in a similar position; and, had other circumstances permitted, would have revolved around the stone as a separate ring; at a distance where the balance or equilibrium of the forces was restored.” And these smaller bodies—fragments of suns and germs of worlds—might have been multiplied just as they were produced; whilst a ready answer is given to the first difficulty suggesting itself—how came all our planets and their satellites, with one distant, obscure, and insufficiently observed exception, to revolve in their orbits in the direction of the sun’s rotation upon his axis, and in the same direction to rotate upon their own? — that upon this principle they could have revolved in no other course.

So much for formation; destruction follows. The fears of Newton and his followers lest the planets might eventually be drawn towards the sun by the interfering operation of their own gravities, were dissipated by Lagrange, who showed by a subtile analysis that the planetary influences rectified each other. But it seems probable that the matter out of which the stars and their satellites was originally formed, has left behind it “the lurking principle of death.” Amongst other effects, the nebulous ether, which accompanies the planets, but cannot rotate as fast as themselves, must slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, yet inevitably compel them to approach the central luminary, and to be finally resolved into it; the wreck of things existent must follow, and the whole system of the suns, if not of the firmaments, begin anew.

In thus briefly attempting to describe the nature of the two most striking subjects of the Architecture of the Heavens, we have omitted all proofs: all allusion to collateral or subordinate points; and almost all the sketches of the characters of the great astronomers, which are picturesquely indicated in the narration of their discoveries, so that we catch glimpses of genius in the moment of its exercise. Our extracts must be taken after an analogous fashion. We shall cull them indifferently from text, notes, and appendix; so that the reader must consider them as specimens of the writer, not of the book. And, having alluded to the powers of telescopes, the first passage shall briefly tell the reader what they are.

Herschel considered that his ten-feet telescope had a space-penetrating power of \(28\frac{1}{2}\), i. e. it could descry a star \(28\frac{1}{2}\) times further off than the naked eye can; to one of his twenty-feet telescopes he assigned the power of 61, and to another of much better construction, the power of 96. The space-penetrating power of the forty-feet instrument he settled at 192! But as you may not have a sufficient idea of the profundities represented by these numbers, I shall convert them into more definite quantities. The depth to which the naked eye can penetrate into space, appears to extend to stars of the twelfth order of distances; i. e. it can descry a star twelve times further away than those luminaries, which, from their superior magnitude, we suppose to be nearest us. Multiply, then, each of the foregoing numbers by twelve, and you have, as a first approximation to the independent powers of telescopes, a new series of figures, indicating how much further they can pierce than the first or nearest range of the fixed stars. In the case of the forty-feet reflector, this number is 2,304; which signifies that, if 2,304 stars, extended in a straight line beyond Sirius, each separated from the one before it by an interval equal to what separates the still immeasurable Sirius from the earth, the forty feet telescope would see them all. I subjoin only one further statement; the same instrument could descry a cluster of stars, consisting of 5,000 individuals, were it situated three hundred thousand times deeper in space than Sirius probably is; or, to take a more distinct standard of comparison, were it at the remoteness of 11,765,475,948,678,678,679 miles.

Herschel thought that our system was gradually shifting its position in the Milky Way, and slowly getting nearer to Hercules. Another astronomer supports the view, and conjectures, that a “degree of those changes which the Earth has undergone since life appeared in it, and because of which our Northern climes were one day capable of harbouring the palms and gigantic ferns of the tropics, may have supervened in consequence of our gradual translation into the chiller regions of space.” See now the supposed geological aspect of our fellow planets and the cessation of riotous disturbing volcanic powers as they get old.

It has long been known that the elevating cause, whatever it is, is not peculiar to this earth; its operations are seen in the Moon, in Venus, Mercury, and also in the Sun. Now, there is an order of age among these celestial bodies. Of the planets, the eldest is the furthest off; then comes Saturn, afterwards Jupiter, the four Asteroids, Mars, the Earth, Venus, Mercury; and the Moon is, perhaps, the most recent of all. A survey of these planets then, shows us this elevating cause in a great variety of epochs; and we find, that the older the planet is, the less rugged or mountainous is it—Saturn and Jupiter show no appearance of mountains; those of Venus, and, in all probability, of Mercury, are gigantic, when compared with the existing elevation of the Earth; and when we reach our own Moon, we find a picture of that torn, crateriform, and disturbed surface, which our own earth may have exhibited when the masses of existing mountains were thrown up, when the pinnacles of the oldest Alps were unabraded, and the ruggedness of the valleys not yet smoothed away by the levelling power of the fluid which deposits and stratifies there the detritus of the primary rocks.

BREWSTER’S PROPOSAL TO MAP THE MOON.

In a letter addressed to me by Sir David Brewster, on occasion of our proposing to erect a new and splendidly-furnished observatory in Glasgow, is the following interesting paragraph: “To such an observatory, where the finest achromatic might be accompanied with a better reflecting telescope than has yet been made, it would be a leading object to delineate with precision the hills and valleys of the moon. This planet is much within our reach; and an accurate knowledge of the phenomena it presents, and of the changes these undergo, would be a great and most interesting contribution to science. When we compare the telescope in Newton’s time to that of Sir William Herschel’s, we can scarcely despair of discovering the structures erected by the inhabitants of that luminary. An achromatic object-glass of the same size as the speculum of Sir William Herschel’s forty-feet telescope, would certainly accomplish this, and no person can say that it is impracticable to do in glass what we have done in metal. Had I the means, I would not scruple to undertake the task of building the lens in zones and segments.” For the honour of British science it is to be hoped that the power of accomplishing what would immortalize the age, will in some way be afforded to this distinguished philosopher.

We will close our extracts with a fitting conclusion, which will also give an example of what Dr. Nichol displays throughout—a high degree of eloquent poetical feeling, and a profound sense of natural piety.

The idea of the ultimate dissolution of the solar system has usually been felt as painful, and forcibly resisted by philosophers. When Newton saw no end to the deranging effect of the common planetary perturbations, he called for the special interference of the Almighty to avert the catastrophe; and great was the rejoicing when that recent analyst descried a memorable power of conservation in our system’s constituent phenomena; but after all, why should it be painful? Absolute permanence is visible nowhere around us, and the fact of change merely intimates, that in the exhaustless womb of the future, unevolved wonders are in store. The phenomenon referred to would simply point to the close of one mighty cycle in the history of the solar orb—the passing away of arrangements which have fulfilled their objects, that they might be transformed into new. Thus is the periodic death of a plant perhaps essential to its prolonged life, and when the individual dies and disappears, fresh and vigorous forms spring from the elements which composed it. Mark the chrysalis! It is the grave of the worm, but the cradle of the sunborn insect. The broken bowl will yet be healed and beautified by the potter, and a voice of joyful note will awaken, one day, even the silence of the urn!

Nay, what though all should pass? What though the close of this epoch in the history of the solar orb should be accompanied, as some by a strange fondness have imagined, by the dissolution and disappearing of all these shining spheres? Then would our universe not have failed in its functions, but only been gathered up and rolled away, these functions being complete. That glorious material framework wherewith the Eternal hath adorned and varied the abysses of space, is only an instrument by which the myriads of spirits born upon its orbs may be told of their origin, and educated for more exalted beings; and a time may come when the veil can be drawn aside—when spirit shall converse directly with spirit, and the creature gaze without a veil upon the effulgent face of its Creator; but even then—no, not in that manhood or full maturity of being, will our fretted vault be forgotten, or its pure inhabitants permitted to drop away. Their reality may have passed, but their remembrance will live for ever. The warm relationships of dependent childhood are only the tenderer and the more hallowed, that the grave has enclosed and embalmed their objects; and no height of excellence, no extent of future greatness, will ever obscure the vividness of that frail but loved infancy, in which, as now, we walked upon the beauteous earth and fondly gazed upon these far-off orbs, deeming that they whisper from their bright abodes the glad tidings of Man’s immortal destiny!

It may not be needful after this to recommend the volume, but justice requires us to say that the Architecture of the Heavens is one of the most interesting expositions of the most stupendous and soul-subduing subject that ever came under our notice. Dealing with abstruse questions, it is perfectly plain; with remote subjects, it is continuously attractive; and though only professing the character of a popular compilation, it shows that natural ability and scientific mastery can impart the spirit and eloquence of originality, even to the humble office of popularizing the discoveries of other men.