The Destinies of the Stars

CHAPTER I. Page

PAGE ORIGIN OF STAR-WORSHIP 1

Position and practical value of astronomy. Worship of stars. Chronology. The Australian negro’s conception of the stars. Day and night, summer and winter. Solar year. Sun-worship. Changing phases of the moon in chronology. The Mexican “Tonalamatl.” Moon-worship in Mesopotamia. Significance of the moon in astrology. The sun and the heat. Agriculture’s demand on chronology. Worship of the planet Venus by the Mexicans and the Babylonians. The Church Calendar. The Zodiac. The seven planets. The week. Correspondence and sympathetic magic. The Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. Astrology and alchemy. Tycho Brahe. Occult sciences. Aristarchos from Samos. Kopernicus. The progress of Astronomy.

CHAPTER II

THE MYSTERY OF THE MILKY WAY 41

Primitive conceptions of the Milky Way. Anaxagoras and Demokritos. Ptolemaios. Galilei. Cosmogenic speculations. Wm. Herschel’s statistical researches regarding the distribution of the stars. The Milky Way as the foundation of the stellar system. The Milky Way as a nebula. Classification according to age of the stars, their distribution and velocity. Motion in the Orion nebula. The planetary nebulæ. Kapteyn’s “star-drifts.” The origin of the Milky Way. Comparison between the Milky Way and a spiral nebula in “The Dogs of Orion.” A few details from the Milky Way. The infinitely great and the infinitely small. The magnitude and destiny of the Milky Way.

CHAPTER III

THE CLIMATIC IMPORTANCE OF WATER VAPOUR 84

The four elements of Aristotle. Humid-warm climates. The Congo and Amazon basins. The carboniferous age. The effect of cloudiness. Desert climate. Steppes. “Kevirs” and “Bayirs.” Sand dunes. The great Kevir. Climatic changes. Khanikoff’s description. Salt lakes. Deposits of salt through evaporation. Huntington about the arefaction of the earth. Humid period during the ice-age. Climatic changes during historic time. Africa, Asia, Greece, Italy, Sicily. West-Europe’s climate has grown more marine. Present conditions.

CHAPTER IV

ATMOSPHERE AND PHYSICS OF THE STELLAR BODIES 119

Outer envelope of the stars. The large planets. Spectra. Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury. Atmosphere impossible on the moon. The light from the Earth. The atmosphere of Mercury. The atmosphere of Venus and its Clouds. Composition of air and its change with height. Forced circulation. Troposphere and Stratosphere. Hydrogen in the highest strata of the atmosphere. Water vapour and carbonic acid in the air. “Geokoronium.” Influence of gravity on composition of the atmosphere. The air on Venus and Mars.

CHAPTER V

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE ATMOSPHERE 155

Inhabited Worlds. Kinship of the stellar bodies. Presence of life. Importance of water and carbon. Importance of temperature. All life evolved from existence in water. Necessity of oxygen. Bacteria. Reducing substances preponderable in the World-matter. Volcanic gases and gases in solidified lava. Water, vapour, carbon dioxide, nitrogen gas, and sulphurous acid. Permanent gases and hydrogen. The poisonous character of the original air. Its purification. The importance of plant life and necessity of a solid crust in this process. Supply of carbonic dioxide and production of oxygen. The work of Koene. Silica. Cooling of the Earth and changing surface temperature. The ice-periods. Centres of collapse and lines of fissure in the crust. General survey of the gradual change of the air.

CHAPTER VI

THE PLANET MARS 180

The controversy about the habitableness of Mars. Humidity on Mars. Early observations. The spectra of Mars and of the Moon compared. Investigations by Campbell and Marchand. The work of Lowell. Measurements by Slipher. Calculations by Very. The temperature on Mars according to these sources. Campbell’s expedition to Mount Whitney in California. Oxygen on Mars. The cold on Mars detrimental to anything but the lowest forms of life. Cause of different results by Slipher and Campbell. Very’s answer to Campbell’s criticism. New measurements by Slipher. Campbell’s new method of measurement of 1910. Christiansen calculates the temperature on Mars from intensity of the Sun’s radiation. The sun-constant. Average temperature of Mars about forty degrees Centigrade. Possibly low plant life around the poles during summer. The canals on Mars are probably fissures in the crust. The length of the canals compared with that of the fissures in Earth’s crust. The double canals on Mars compared with the parallel fissures in Calabria. Emanations along the fissures. The canals as affected by increasing cold or heat. The polar snow. Thawing of the canals. Travel of the water vapour independent of the topography. The desert sand on Mars. Clouds and mists. Highlands and mountains on Mars. Sand filling of the canals. The seas on Mars. The straightness and uniform breadth of the canals an illusion. Light and dark spots. “New” canals. The fancies of Lowell.

CHAPTER VII

MERCURY, THE MOON, AND VENUS 228

Fissures on Mercury. Lowell’s drawing. Centres of collapse. Absence of atmosphere. The climate on the Moon. W. Pickering’s belief in frost formations on the Moon. The mountains on the Moon. Volcanoes. Circular elevated rings. “Seas” on the Moon. The Crater “Linné.” “Sinuses” and “Streaks” on the Moon. The light matter of the streaks probably lava-scum. The colour of the Moon and of the Earth. Comparison between the Moon and Mars. Changes on the Moon. “Snow” and “Vegetation” on the Moon according to W. Pickering. The fate of Mars and of the Earth. Falling meteoric dust. The climate on Venus. Swamps like those of the carboniferous age. Abundant vegetation. Low organisms. “Culture” on Venus will proceed from the poles. The future of Venus. The claims of astrology in modern light. Tycho Brahe. The dreams of Giordano Bruno probably true.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE FIG. 1.--THE MILKY WAY 46 Photo by Easton.

FIG. 2.--PLANETARY NEBULA NO. 7009, NEW GENERAL CATALOGUE 52

FIG. 3.--NEBULA NO. 4594, NEW GENERAL CATALOGUE 66

FIG. 4.--NEBULA NO. 101 IN MESSIER’S CATALOGUE 70

FIG. 5.--NEBULA NO. 51 IN MESSIER’S CATALOGUE 71

FIG. 6.--MILKY WAY BETWEEN CASSIOPEIA AND SWAN 76 According to Wolf.

FIG. 7.--MILKY WAY IN EAGLE AND SAGITTARIUS 76 According to Wolf.

FIG. 8.--THE “TRIFID” HOLE IN EAGLE 77 According to Wolf.

FIG. 9.--TARIM RIVER WITH LAKES AND BAYIRS 96 According to Sven Hedin.

FIG. 10.--THE FORMER LAKE BONNEVILLE IN UTAH 106

FIG. 11.--JUPITER, 1909 122 According to F. le Coultre.

FIG. 12.--SATURN, 1909 123 According to F. le Coultre.

FIG. 13.--SPECTRA OF THE MAJOR PLANETS 124 According to V. M. Slipher.

FIG. 14.--VENUS OBSERVED BY LANGLEY IN 1882 136

FIG. 15.--ROCK FISSURE AT HANGO, SWEDEN 204 Photo by I. I. Sederholm.

FIG. 16.--EARTHQUAKE CENTERS IN CALABRIA 205 According to I. I. Sederholm.

FIG. 17.--MAPS OF MARS BY SCHIAPARELLI AND ANTONIADI At the end

FIG. 17a.--MAPS OF MARS BY SCHIAPARELLI AND ANTONIADI At the end

FIG. 18.--PHOTO OF MARS BY LAMPLAND 210

FIG. 19.--MARS ON APRIL 8, 1909 210 According to Quenisset.

FIG. 20.--THE SOUTH POLE SPOT ON MARS, 1909 210 According to Jarry Desloges.

FIG. 21.--SANDSTORM ON MARS, 1909 210 According to Antoniadi.

FIG. 22.--CLOUD ON EDGE OF MARS, THE 7TH OF MARCH, 1901 216 According to Molesworth.

FIG. 23.--MARS, JULY 11, 1907 216 According to Lowell.

FIG. 24.--MARS, OCTOBER 6, 1909 216 According to Antoniadi.

FIG. 25.--MERCURY 230 According to Lowell.

FIG. 26.--THE MOON NEAR THE CRATER TYCHO 230 Photo from Yerkes Observatory.

FIG. 27.--MARE SERENITATIS AND MARE TRANQUILLITATIS 231 Photo from Yerkes Observatory.

FIG. 28.--THE MOON NEAR ITS SOUTH POLE 240 Photo from Yerkes Observatory.

FIG. 29.--THE LUNAR CRATER COPERNICUS AND VICINITY 242 Photo from Yerkes Observatory.

The Destinies of the Stars

CHAPTER I. The Origin of Star-Worship

THE ORIGIN OF STAR-WORSHIP

Astronomy occupies a rather unique position among the natural sciences. While physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences form the foundation of the extraordinary material development of our day, astronomy, in the eyes of most people, is of little practical value. What benefit could we derive from knowing whether a star lies a hundred or a thousand billion miles from the Sun, or from understanding how the stellar bodies have evolved in the course of billions of years? And yet astronomy has not been as futile as is commonly imagined, neither is it useless at the present time. This science is still of the greatest importance to common life by fixing our standards of time and, before the introduction of the compass, was invaluable also to navigation, which art, moreover, depends now upon astronomy for determination of geographical position on the open sea. Observations for these purposes, however, are of such a simple nature, that they hardly fall under the astronomical science proper, but rather under the applied sciences. They have entered into daily life much as, in commerce, the determination of the weight of a body is not considered as belonging to the science of physics, although it depends on the use of a physical instrument, the scale.

But we must not forget that what we now consider so commonplace that it entirely has lost the grand aspect of science, once was the goal of groping scientific endeavour. All natural science has grown out of the needs of practical life.

Geometry is probably even older than astronomy. The name means: to measure land, and the oldest geometry was, accordingly, devoted to the measurement of distances on the Earth and later to the determination of the area of land-holdings. This extremely important practical application of geometry is of such a simple nature that it is not mentioned in modern mathematical science, to which geometry belongs. In this manner, the original theses of all our natural sciences have become the possession of the public to such a degree that they are looked upon as self-evident. This is the case also with those parts of astronomy which, because of their practical importance at the outset, gave rise to the science itself.

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