Part 35

In the form of its orbit, in its movements round the sun and on its own axis, in the succession of days and seasons, and in all the phenomena governed by the great law of attraction, the earth becomes the representative of all the other planets; in studying it, we study all the heavenly bodies.

Our planet is a spheroid; that is, a sphere flattened at the two poles and enlarged at the equator, so that all the circles passing through the extremity of the polar axis form ellipses. The presumed depression of each pole is about thirteen miles, nearly a three-hundredth part of the radius of the earth; but it is not altogether certain that the two poles are equally flattened. Perhaps a contrast exists between the two hemispheres, not only in the features of their continents and the distribution of seas, but also in their geometrical shape. Be this as it may, it appears to be proved that the curvature is not exactly the same at all points of the earth at an equal distance from the poles; the meridians appear without exception to be irregular ellipses.

The dimensions of the earth, as we have already seen, are almost as nothing compared with the larger celestial bodies, and especially with the extent of space which can be explored by the telescope. If light, the speed of which has been adopted in astronomy as a term of comparison, could be diffused in a curved line, it would travel seven times round the globe in a second of time; this standard of measurement, therefore, the only one suited to the stellary field, is completely inapplicable to the surface of our globe.

The isolated globule in the immensity of space which we call the earth is not motionless, as the ancients necessarily supposed, looking upon it, as they did, as the immovable base of the firmament of heaven. Hurried on in the vortex of universal vitality, our globe is ever actuated by ceaseless motion, describing in ether a series of elliptic spirals so complicated that astronomers have not yet been able to calculate their various curves. Besides rotating on its own axis, the earth describes an ellipse round the sun, and, under the influence of this body, is drawn along from one heaven to another toward distant constellations. It also oscillates and rocks on its axis, and deviates more or less from its path, to salute, as it were, every heavenly body which meets it. It is probable that it never passes a second time through the same regions of the air; yet, if it has again to traverse the spiral line of ellipses it has already described, it would be after a cycle of so many thousands of millions of years, that the earth itself, completely transformed, would be no longer the same planet.

The motion of the earth, the immediate effects of which are the most obvious to the notice of men, is the daily rotation which takes place round an ideal axis passing through the two poles. The globe turns from right to left, or from west to east—that is, in a contrary direction to the apparent motion of the sun and stars, which seem to rise in the east and to set in the west. As the earth’s axis terminates at each pole, there is least surface-motion at those points, and the motion is the more rapid in any part of the surface of the globe the further it is from the central axis. At St. Petersburg, in 60° latitude, the speed of rotation is about nine miles a minute; in Paris, it exceeds eleven and a half miles during the same brief time; on the equatorial line, which may be looked upon as the ring of an immense wheel, the speed of the earth is twice as great as it is at 60° of latitude—that is, about eighteen miles a minute, or 528 yards a second—a rapidity equal to the flight of a 26-pound cannon-ball impelled by thirteen pounds of powder. By means of this rotatory motion, the earth presents toward the sun each of its faces alternately, and each also in turn toward the comparatively darker regions of space; the succession of day and night is thus constituted. In addition to this, the rotation of the earth is an important fact which must always be taken into account in determining the direction of fluids in motion on the surface of the globe, such as streams and rivers, also marine and atmospheric currents.

The annual revolution which the earth performs round the sun follows the line of an ellipse, one of the foci of which is occupied by the central star; the eccentricity of the ellipse is nearly equal to 17/1000th of the great axis. The distance between the sun and the earth always varies according to the particular point of its orbit which the latter is traveling over. At its aphelion, that is, at its greatest remoteness, this distance is about 93¾ millions of miles; at the period of its perihelion, when the two heavenly bodies are nearest to each other, it is approximately 90,259,000 miles. The mean distance, as estimated by astronomers since the corrections of Encke, Hansen, Foucault, and Hind, is 91,839,000 miles. This extent of space is traversed by the solar rays in 8 minutes, 16 seconds; sound would take fifteen years in passing through the same distance.

As Kepler has laid down in his celebrated laws, our planet moves with an increased rapidity as it approaches nearer to the sun and travels more slowly in proportion to its distance from that luminary; but its mean speed may be estimated at nearly nineteen miles a second, or sixty times the rapidity of a ball from the cannon’s mouth. This speed, which makes one dizzy to think of, is to be added, as regards each point in the surface of the earth, to the rotatory motion which impels it round the polar axis.

After having turned round 366 times on its axis, our planet has terminated its orbicular course, and is in the same position relatively to the sun as at its starting-point; it has then accomplished its year.

This daily rotation of the earth round its axis produces the succession of days and nights, and, in the same way, its annual revolution round the sun causes the alternations of the seasons. If the axis of the earth, that is the ideal line which passes through its two poles, were perpendicular to the plane of its annual orbit, it is evident that the portion of the globe lighted by the sun would invariably extend from one pole to the other, and that in both hemispheres the days and nights would always consist of twelve hours each. But this is not the case. The earth performs its revolutionary movements in an inclined position; its ideal polar axis is sloped about 23° 28′ from a perpendicular to its plane, and this position is so far maintained that as regards the comparatively rapid succession of days and seasons it may be looked upon as invariable. This obliquity of axis causes continued changes in the phase presented to the sun. The portion of the earth illumined by the rays of the sun varies every day; for, although the planetary axis may appear to maintain its extremity in a fixed position as regards some point in infinite space, in respect to the sun it presents a constantly varying degree of inclination, in consequence of the continual motion of the earth. Twice during the course of the year it so happens that the solar rays fall perpendicularly upon the equator of the earth; at every other period in the annual revolution, sometimes the Northern and sometimes the Southern Hemisphere receives the greatest amount of light.

The astronomical year commences on the 20th of March, at the exact moment when the sun illumines the equator in a vertical direction, and the line of separation between light and shade passes through the two poles. The period of darkness is then equal to that of light, and admits of exactly twelve hours at all points of the earth. Hence the name of “equinox” (equality of nights). But after this day, which in the Northern Hemisphere serves as the starting-point of spring, the earth continues its translatory movement. In consequence of the inclination of its axis, the Northern Hemisphere, being turned toward the sun, receives a greater quantity of light, while the southern half of the globe is less vividly lighted. The vertical rays of the sun now fall more and more to the north of the equator, and the circle of light, far from arresting its progress at the poles, where the day of six months’ duration is commencing to dawn, extends far beyond it over the regions of the north. On the 21st of June, the day of the first solstice, the axis of the earth being deeply inclined toward the sun, this luminary shines on the zenith of the tropic of Cancer at 23½° north of the equator, and its light illumines the whole of the arctic zone, that is, the portion of the earth’s surface extending to 23½° round the North Pole. Then spring ceases and summer begins as regards the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, on the contrary, autumn is giving place to winter. Above the equator long days are prevailing, interrupted by short nights; while in the south it is the nights which last the longest. In the arctic zone the sun performs its apparent course of diurnal rotation entirely above the horizon. The six months’ day, which spring inaugurated at the North Pole, attains its high noon on the first day of summer. At the same moment midnight arrives in the darkness which is oppressing its antipodes.

Immediately after the 21st of June all the phenomena which took place during the preceding season are directly reversed. The sun appears to retrograde toward the southern horizon; its vertical rays cease to fall on the line of the northern tropic, and constantly approach the equator. The zone of light in the northern pole and of shade in the southern equally diminish, and the days shorten in the Northern Hemisphere in the same proportion as they lengthen in the Southern; an equilibrium is gradually being re-established between the two halves of the earth. On the 22d of September the position of the sun is again exactly above the equator, and its light just reaches both poles. The equinox, or the absolute equality of day and night in every part of the globe, occurs for the second time in the year; but this moment of equilibrium is, so to speak, but a mathematical point between the two seasons. The axis of the earth which, during the six months past, turned the North Pole toward the sun, now presents to him the South Pole; the vertical rays of the central luminary fall to the south of the earth’s equator, and the Southern Hemisphere, in its turn, is the best endowed of the two halves of the globe in the amount of light it receives and in the length of its days. In the Southern Hemisphere spring is commencing; in the Northern, autumn. Three months afterward, on the 21st of December, the sun comes directly over the southern tropic, or the tropic of Capricorn, 23½° south of the equator, and the whole of the antarctic zone is presented to the solar rays. Summer has begun in the Southern Hemisphere, and at the same time winter commences in that of the north. Then, as the globe moves on, these two seasons follow each other in their course, until at length the earth attains a position similar to that from which it started; the March equinox, the first day of spring in Europe, and the first day of autumn in Australia, commences anew the astronomical year.

The elliptical form of the earth’s orbit and the unequal pace of the globe in the various points of its course cause some considerable variations in the duration of the seasons. In fact, from the 20th of March to the 22d of September, that is, during the spring and summer of the Northern Hemisphere, the earth takes 186 days to travel over the first and largest half of its orbit, while during the winter period, from the 22d of September to the 20th of March, only 179 days are required to accomplish the second half of its journey. The summer period of the Northern Hemisphere actually exceeds by seven or eight days, or about 187 hours, the corresponding period in the southern half of the globe; added to this, in consequence of the longer space of time during which the Arctic Pole remains inclined toward the sun in the regions north of the equator, the hours of daylight exceed the hours of night, while in the south the hours of darkness predominate. This is, however, to some extent compensated for; as, although in the southern regions of the earth the summer lasts a shorter time, our planet is then closer to the sun; it is at its perihelion, and consequently receives a larger proportion of heat. There is, however, no doubt about the fact—as it is proved by a direct observation, both of the winds and currents, and also of their various temperatures—that, taking an equal distance from the equator, the southern regions are colder than those of the north.

If an equality of seasons between the two halves of the world does not at present exist, it will not fail to be established after a long series of centuries by means of a slow terrestrial movement, which has been known by the name of the precession of the equinoxes. Just as a top (if we may be allowed to avail ourselves of so old an illustration) turns round on the ground and bends over successively in every direction, thus describing with its axis an ideal cone, so the earth revolves in space, and slowly sways the line of its poles. This line, which is always sloped at an angle of 66° 32′ to the plane of the terrestrial orbit, turns round with a slight lateral motion, so as always to point to a new region of the sky; if it were prolonged indefinitely it would describe a circle amid the distant stars. As the axis of the earth is constantly changing its direction in this way, the plane of the equator must vary exactly to the same extent in its position as regards the sun. In fact, every year the exact moment of the March equinox anticipates by about twenty minutes the time at which the corresponding equinox fell in the year preceding. Each revolution of the earth round the sun brings a fresh advance of twenty minutes in the determination of the equinox; and as, during the long course of ages, the axis of the earth does not intermit in this swaying motion, the time must come, after a period of 12,900 years, that the conditions of the seasons will be altogether changed. The hemisphere which hitherto received the larger proportion of heat will receive the lesser share, and that half of the globe which has endured the larger number of wintry days will now, in its turn, enjoy the more lengthened period of summer. Then, after a second period of 12,900 years, during which the relation between the seasons of the two hemispheres is being gradually modified, the axis of the earth completes its round of swaying, which has lasted for 258 centuries, and the position of the globe in respect to the sun being nearly the same as at its starting-point, a second cycle of seasons will then commence.

We might call this period the earth’s great year, if, at the end of it, the earth were in an identical position to that which it occupied at the commencement; but this is not the case. The attraction of the moon, and the disturbances caused by the vicinity of certain planets, are incessantly modifying the curve described in the starry fields of space by the earth’s axis, and complicate it with a multitude of spirals, the various periods of which do not coincide with the great period of the swaying of the axis. The successive undulations form a continuous system of interwoven spirals. “It is a manifestation of the infinite.”

But even this is not all. In addition to all the motions of the globe which we have already pointed out—its diurnal rotation, its annual revolution round the sun, the rhythmical swaying of its axis, proved by the precession of the equinoxes, the nutation or more rapid swaying which is caused by the attraction of the moon—we must now notice the enormous translatory movement which is dragging it through endless tracks of space in the train of the sun. Not many years ago, this motion was entirely unknown to astronomers, and yet it is going on with inconceivable rapidity—a rapidity more than double that of the course of the planet round its central luminary. In one second of time the earth moves about forty-four miles toward the point of the heavens where we find the constellation of Hercules. During one year only she travels 1,382 millions of miles in this direction. Our own little earth itself is carried on from space to space, and never closes the cycle of its revolutions. Ever since the time when its particles were first grouped together, it has been describing in space the infinite spiral of its ellipses, and thus will it go on turning and oscillating in ether until the moment when it will exist no longer as an independent planet. For the earth, too, must have an end; like every other body in the universe, it comes into existence, and lives only to die when its turn comes. Already its annual motion of rotation is diminishing in speed; certainly this slackening of pace is not very observable, since no astronomer from Hipparchus to Laplace has yet exactly defined it. But, unless some cosmical force acting in a contrary direction compensates for the loss of speed caused by the friction of the tides against the bed and the shores of the ocean, the impetus of our planet will every century diminish. After various catastrophes which it is impossible to foresee, the earth will eventually completely change its course of action, and lose its independent existence, either uniting itself with other planetary bodies or breaking up into fragments; or it will perhaps terminate its course by falling like a mere aerolite upon the surface of the sun.

THE MOON.—THOMAS GWYN ELGER

We know, both by tradition and published records, that from the earliest times the faint gray and light spots which diversify the face of our satellite excited the wonder and stimulated the curiosity of mankind, giving rise to superstitions more or less crude and erroneous as to their actual nature and significance. It is true that Anaxagoras, five centuries before our era, and probably other philosophers preceding him—certainly Plutarch at a much later date—taught that these delicate markings and differences of tint, obvious to every one with normal vision, point to the existence of hills and valleys on her surface; the latter maintaining that the irregularities of outline presented by the “terminator,” or line of demarcation between the illumined and unillumined portion of her spherical superficies, are due to mountains and their shadows; but more than fifteen centuries elapsed before the truth of this sagacious conjecture was unquestionably demonstrated. Selenography, as a branch of observational astronomy, dates from the spring of 1609, when Galileo directed his “optic tube” to the moon, and in the following year, in the Sidereus Nuncius, or the “Intelligencer of the Stars,” gave to an astonished and incredulous world an account of the unsuspected marvels it revealed.

The bright and dusky areas, so obvious to the unaided sight, were found by Galileo to be due to a very manifest difference in the character of the lunar surface, a large portion of the Northern Hemisphere, and no inconsiderable part of the southeastern quadrant, being seen to consist of large gray monotonous tracts, often bordered by lofty mountains, while the remainder of the superficies was much more conspicuously brilliant, and, moreover, included by far the greater number of those curious ring-mountains and other extraordinary features whose remarkable aspect and peculiar arrangement first attracted his attention.

Before the close of the century when selenography first became possible, Hevel of Dantzig, Scheiner, Langrenus (cosmographer to the King of Spain), Riccioli, the Jesuit astronomer of Bologna, and Dominic Cassini, the celebrated French astronomer, greatly extended the knowledge of the moon’s surface, and published drawings of various phases and charts, which, though very rude and incomplete, were a clear advance upon what Galileo, with his inferior optical means, had been able to accomplish. Langrenus, and after him Hevel, gave distinctive names to the various formations, mainly derived from terrestrial physical features, for which Riccioli subsequently substituted those of philosophers, mathematicians, and other celebrities; and Cassini determined by actual measurement the relative position of many of the principal objects on the disk, thus laying the foundation of an accurate system of lunar topography; while the labors of T. Mayer and Schröter in the Eighteenth Century, and of Lohrmann, Mädler, Neison (Nevill), Schmidt, and other observers in the Nineteenth, have been mainly devoted to the study of the minuter detail of the moon and its physical characteristics.

As was manifest to the earliest telescopic observers, its visible surface is clearly divisible into strongly contrasted areas, differing both in color and structural character. Somewhat less than half of what we see of it consists of comparatively level dark tracts, some of them many thousands of square miles in extent, the monotony of whose dusky superficies is often unrelieved for great distances by any prominent object; while the remainder, everywhere manifestly brighter, is not only more rugged and uneven, but is covered to a much greater extent with numbers of quasi-circular formations differing widely in size, classed as walled-plains, ring-plains, craters, craterlets, crater-cones, etc. (the latter bearing a great outward resemblance to some terrestrial volcanoes), and mountain ranges of vast proportions, isolated hills and other features.

Though nothing resembling sheets of water, either of small or large extent, has ever been detected on the surface of the moon, the superficial resemblance, in small telescopes, of the large gray tracts to the appearance which we may suppose our terrestrial lakes and oceans would present to an observer on the moon, naturally induced the early selenographers to term them Maria, or “seas”—a convenient name, which is still maintained, without, however, implying that these areas, as we now see them, are, or ever were, covered with water.

There are twenty-three of these dusky areas which have received distinctive names; seventeen of them are wholly, or in great part, confined to the northern and to the southeastern quarter of the Southern Hemisphere—the southwestern quadrant being to a great extent devoid of them. By far the largest is the vast Oceanus Procellarum, extending from a high northern latitude to beyond latitude 10° in the southeastern quadrant, and, according to Schmidt, with its bays and inflections, occupying an area of nearly two million square miles, or more than that of all the remaining Maria put together. Next in order of size come the Mare Nubium, or about one-fifth the superficies, covering a large portion of the southeastern quadrant, and extending considerably north of the equator, and the Mare Imbrium, wholly confined to the northeastern quadrant, and including an area of about 340,000 square miles. These are by far the largest lunar “seas”. The Mare Fœcunditatis, in the Western Hemisphere, the greater part of it lying in the southwestern quadrant, is scarcely half so big as the Mare Imbrium; while the Maria Serenitatis and Tranquilitatis, about equal in area (the former situated wholly north of the equator and the latter only partially extending south of it), are still smaller. The arctic Mare Frigoris, some 100,000 square miles in extent, is the only remaining large sea; the rest, such as the Mare Vaporum, the Sinus Medii, the Mare Crisium, the Mare Humorum, and the Mare Humboldtianum, are of comparatively small dimensions, the Mare Crisium not greatly exceeding 70,000 square miles, the Mare Humorum (about the size of England) 50,000 square miles, while the Mare Humboldtianum, according to Schmidt, includes only about 42,000 square miles, an area which is approached by some formations not classed with the Maria.

Among the Maria which exhibit the most remarkable arrangement of ridges is the Mare Humorum, in the southeastern quadrant. Here, if it be observed under a rising sun, a number of these objects will be seen extending from the region north of the ring-mountain Vitello in long undulating lines, roughly concentric with the western border of the “sea,” and gradually diminishing in altitude as they spread out, with many ramifications, to a distance of 200 miles or more toward the north. At this stage of illumination they are strikingly beautiful in a good telescope, reminding one of the ripple-marks left by the tide on a soft, sandy beach. Like most other objects of their class, they are very evanescent, gradually disappearing as the sun rises higher in the lunar firmament, and ultimately leaving nothing to indicate their presence beyond here and there a ghostly streak or vein of a somewhat lighter hue than that of the neighboring surface.

The Maria, like almost every other part of the visible surface, abound in craters of a minute type, which are scattered here and there without any apparent law or ascertained principle of arrangement.

Walled-plains, approximating more or less to the circular form, though frequently deviating considerably from it, are among the largest inclosures on the moon. They vary from upward of 150 to 160 miles or under in diameter, and are often encircled by a complex rampart of considerable breadth, rising in some instances to a height of 12,000 feet or more above the inclosed plain. This rampart is rarely continuous, but is generally interrupted by gaps, crossed by transverse valleys and passes and broken by more recent craters and depressions. As a rule, the area within the circumvallation (usually termed “the floor”) is only slightly, if at all, lower than the region outside: it is very generally of a dusky hue, similar to that of the gray plains of Maria, and, like them, is usually variegated by the presence of hills, ridges, and craters, and is sometimes traversed by delicate furrows, termed clefts or rills.

Ptolemæus, in the third quadrant and not far removed from the centre of the disk, may be taken as a typical example of the class. Here we have a vast plain, 115 miles from side to side, encircled by a massive but much broken wall, which at one peak towers more than 9,000 feet above a level floor, which includes details of a very remarkable character. The adjoining Alphonsus is another, but somewhat smaller object of the same type, as are also Albategnius and Arzachel; and Plato, in a high northern latitude, with its noble, many-peaked rampart and its variable steel-gray interior, Grimaldi, near the eastern limb (perhaps the darkest area on the moon), Schickard, nearly as big on the southeastern limb, and Bailly, larger than either (still further south in the same quadrant), although they approach some of the smaller “seas” in size, are placed in the same category. The conspicuous central mountain, so frequently associated with other types of ringed inclosures, is by no means invariably found within the walled-plains; though, as in the case of Petavius, Langrenus, Gassendi, and several other noteworthy examples, it is very prominently displayed. The progress of sunrise on all these objects affords a magnificent spectacle. Very often when the rays infringe on their apparently level floor at an angle of from 1° to 2°, it is seen to be coarse, rough grained, and covered with minute elevations, although an hour or so afterward it appears as smooth as glass.

The more massive and extended mountain ranges of the moon are found in the Northern Hemisphere, and (what is significant) in that portion of it which exhibits few indications of other superficial disturbances. The most prominently developed systems, the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Apennines, forming a mighty western rampart to the Mare Imbrium and giving it all the appearance of a vast walled-plain, present few points of resemblance to any terrestrial chain. The former include many hundred peaks, among which Mont Blanc rises to a height of 12,000 feet, and a second, some distance west of Plato, to nearly as great an altitude; while others ranging from 5,000 to 8,000 feet are common. They extend in a southwest direction from Plato to the Caucasus, terminating somewhat abruptly, a little west of the central meridian in about N. lat. 42°. One of the most interesting features associated with this range is the so-called great Alpine valley, which cuts through it west of Plato.

The Caucasus consist of a massive wedge-shaped mountain land, projecting southward, and partially dividing the Mare Imbrium from the Mare Serenitatis, both of which they flank. Though without peaks so lofty as those pertaining to the Alps, there is one, immediately east of the ring-plain Calippus, which, towering to 19,000 feet, surpasses any of which the latter system can boast. The Apennines, however, are by far the most magnificent range on the visible surface, including as they do some 3,000 peaks, and extending in an almost continuous curve of more than 400 miles in length from Mount Hadley, on the north, to the fine ring-plain Eratosthenes, which forms a fitting termination, on the south. The great headland Mount Hadley rises more than 15,000 feet, while a neighboring promontory on the southeast of it is fully 14,000 feet, and another, close by, is still higher above the Mare. Mount Huyghens, again in N. lat. 20°, and the square-shaped mass Mount Wolf, near the southern end of the chain, include peaks standing 18,000 and 12,000 feet respectively above the plain to which their flanks descend with a steep declivity. The counterscarp of the Apennines, in places 160 miles in width from east to west, runs down to the Mare Vaporum, with a comparatively gentle inclination. It is everywhere traversed by winding valleys of a very intricate type, all trending toward the southwest, and includes some very bright craters and mountain-rings.