← catalogue

Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12

by Elbert Hubbard · English · Gutenberg #19080 · 514,352 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12

Author: Elbert Hubbard


        
Release date: August 19, 2006 [eBook #19080]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19080

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT - VOLUME 12 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







  Little
  Journeys
  To the Homes of Great Scientists


  Elbert Hubbard


  Memorial Edition




  Printed and made into a Book by
  The Roycrofters, who are in East
  Aurora, Erie County, New York

  Wm. H. Wise & Co.
  New York

  Copyright, 1916,
  By The Roycrofters




  CONTENTS


  SIR ISAAC NEWTON                                                     9

  GALILEO                                                             45

  COPERNICUS                                                          85

  HUMBOLDT                                                           121

  WILLIAM HERSCHEL                                                   163

  CHARLES DARWIN                                                     197

  HAECKEL                                                            235

  LINNÆUS                                                            263

  THOMAS H. HUXLEY                                                   303

  JOHN TYNDALL                                                       333

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE                                              365

  JOHN FISKE                                                         395




[Illustration: SIR ISAAC NEWTON]

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

     When you come into any fresh company, observe their humours. Suit
     your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their
     converse more free and open. Let your discourse be more in querys
     and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being
     the designe of travelers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will
     persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of
     them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to
     you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than
     peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming
     wiser, or much more ignorant than your company. Seldom discommend
     anything though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you
     bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to
     commend any thing more than is due, than to discommend a thing soe
     much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with
     oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men
     that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate
     into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and
     commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison.

     --_Sir Isaac Newton to one of his pupils_


SIR ISAAC NEWTON

An honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was
married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two.

Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any
education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class--that
oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the
world. Accounts still in existence show that their income was thirty
pounds a year. It was for them to toil all the week, go to church on
Sunday, and twice or thrice in a year attend the village fairs or
indulge in a holiday where hard cider played an important part.

Isaac had served his two years in the army, taken a turn at sea, and got
his discharge-papers. Now he had married the lass of his choice, and
settled down in the little house on an estate in Lincolnshire where his
father was born and died.

Spring came and the roses clambered over the stone walls; the bobolinks
played hide-and-seek in the waving grass of the meadows; the skylarks
sang and poised and soared; the hedgerows grew white with
hawthorn-blossoms and musical with the chirp of sparrows; the cattle
ranged through the fragrant clover "knee-deep in June."

Oftentimes the young wife worked with her husband in the fields, or went
with him to market. Great plans were laid as to what they would do next
year, and the year after, and how they would provide for coming age and
grow old together, here among the oaks and the peace and plenty of
Lincolnshire.

In such a country, with such a climate, it seems as if one could almost
make repair equal waste, and thus keep death indefinitely at bay. But
all men, even the strongest, are living under a death sentence, with but
an indefinite reprieve. And even yet, with all of our science and
health, we can not fully account for those diseases which seemingly pick
the very best flower of sinew and strength.

Isaac Newton, the strong and rugged farmer, sickened and died in a week.
"The result of a cold caught when sweaty and standing in a draft," the
surgeon explained. "The act of God to warn us all of the vanity of
life." Acute pneumonia, perhaps, is what we would call it--a fever that
burned out the bellows in a week.

In such cases the very strength of the man seems to supply fuel for the
flames. And so just as the Autumn came with changing leaves, the young
wife was left to fight the battle of life alone--alone, save for the
old, old miracle that her life supported another. A wife, a widow, a
mother--all within a year!

On Christmas-Day the babe was born--born where most men die: in
obscurity. He was so weak and frail that none but the mother believed he
would live.

The doctor quoted a line from "Richard the Third," "Sent before my time
into this breathing world scarce half made up," and gave the infant into
the keeping of an old nurse with an ominous shake of the head, and went
his way, absolved. His time was too valuable to waste on such a useless
human mite.

The persistent words of the mother that the child should not, must not
die, possibly had something to do with keeping the breath of life in the
puny man-child. The fond mother had given him the name of his father,
even before birth! He was to live to do the work that the man now dead
had hoped to do; that is, live a long and honest life, and leave the
fair acres more valuable than he found them.

Such was the inauspicious beginning of what Herbert Spencer declared was
the greatest life since Aristotle studied the starry universe.

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside of India the lot of widows is not especially to be pitied. A
widow has beautiful dreams, while the married woman copes with the stern
reality.

Then, no phase of life is really difficult when you accept it; and the
memory of a great love lost is always a blessing and a benediction to
the one who endures the first cruel shock.

The young widow looked after her little estate, and with perhaps some
small assistance from her parents, lived comfortably and as happily as
one has a right to in this vale of tears. Her baby boy had grown strong
and well: by the time he was two years old he was quite the equal of
most babies--and his mother thought, beyond them.

It is quite often stoutly declared by callow folks that mother-love is
the strongest and most enduring love in the world, but the wise waste no
words on such an idle proposition. Mother-love retires into the shadow
when the other kind appears.

When the Reverend Barnabas Smith began, unconsciously, to make eyes at
the Widow Newton over his prayer-book, the good old dames whose business
it is to look after these things, and perform them vicariously, made
prophecies on the way home from church as to how soon the wedding would
occur.

People go to church to watch and pray, but a man I know says that women
go to church to watch. Young clergymen fall an easy prey to designing
widows, he avers. I can discover no proof, however, that the Widow
Newton made any original designs; she was below the young clergyman in
social standing, and when the good man began to pay special attentions
to her baby boy she never imagined that the sundry pats and caresses
were meant for her.

Little Isaac Newton was just three years old when the wedding occurred,
and was not troubled about it. The bride went to live with her husband
at the rectory, a mile away, and the little boy in dresses, with long
yellow curls, was taken to the home of his grandmother. The Reverend
Barnabas Smith didn't like babies as well as he had at first thought.
Grandparents are inclined to be lax in their discipline. And anyway it
is no particular difference if they are: a scarcity of discipline is
better than too much. More boys have been ruined by the rod than saved
by it--love is a good substitute for a cat-'o-nine-tails.

There were several children born to the Reverend Barnabas Smith and his
wife, and all were disciplined for their own good. Isaac, a few miles
away, snuggled in the arms of his old grandmother when he was bad and
went scot-free.

Many years after, Sir Isaac Newton, in an address on education at
Cambridge, playfully referred to the fact that in his boyhood he did not
have to prevaricate to escape punishment, his grandmother being always
willing to lie for him. His grandmother was his first teacher and his
best friend as long as she lived.

When he was twelve years old he was sent to the village school at
Grantham, eight miles away. There he boarded with a family by the name
of Clark, and at odd times helped in the apothecary-shop of Mr. Clark,
cleaning bottles and making pills. He himself has told us that the
working with mortar and pestle, cutting the pills in exact cubes, and
then rolling one in each hand between thumb and finger, did him a lot of
good, whether the patients were benefited or not.

The genial apothecary also explained that pills were for those who made
and sold them, and that if they did no harm to those who swallowed them,
the whole transaction was then one of benefit. All of which proves to us
that men had the essence of wisdom two hundred years ago, quite as much
as now.

The master of the school at Grantham was one Mr. Stokes, a man of
genuine insight and tact--two things rather rare in the pedagogic
equipment at that time. The Newton boy was small and stood low in his
class, perhaps because book-learning had not been the bent of his
grandmother. The fact that Isaac was neither strong nor smart, nor even
smartly dressed, caused him to serve in the capacity of a butt for the
bullies.

One big boy in particular made it his business to punch, kick and cuff
him on all occasions, in class or out. This continued for a month, when
one day the little boy invited the big one out into the churchyard and
there fell upon him tooth and claw. The big boy had strength, but the
little one had right on his side.

The schoolmaster looked over the wall and shouted, "Thrice armed is he
who knows his cause is just!" In two minutes the bully was beaten, but
the schoolmaster's son, who stood by as master of ceremonies, suggested
that the big boy have his nose rubbed against the wall of the church for
luck. This was accordingly done, not o'er-gently, and when Isaac
returned to the schoolroom, the master, who was supposed to know nothing
officially of the fighting, prophesied, "Young Mr. Newton will yet beat
any boy in this school in his studies."

It has been suggested that this prophecy was made after its fulfilment,
but even so, we know that Mr. Stokes lived long enough to take great
pride in the Newton boy, and to grow reminiscent concerning his great
achievements.

Our hearts surely go out to the late Mr. Stokes, schoolmaster at
Grantham.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is surely something in that old idea of Indians that when they
killed an enemy the strength of the fallen adversary entered into
themselves.

This encounter of little Isaac with the school bully was a pivotal point
in his career. He had vanquished the rogue physically, and he now set to
work to do as much mentally for the whole school. He had it in him--it
was just a matter of application.

Once, in after-life, in speaking of those who had benefited him most, he
placed this unnamed chucklehead first, and added with a smile, "Our
enemies are quite as necessary to us as our friends."

In a few months Isaac stood at the head of the class. In mathematics he
especially excelled, and the Master, who prided himself on being able to
give problems no one could solve but himself, found that he was put to
the strait of giving a problem nobody could solve. He was somewhat taken
aback when little Isaac declined to work on it, and coolly pointed out
the fallacy involved. The only thing for the teacher to do was to say he
had purposely given the proposition to see if any one would detect the
fallacy. This he gracefully did, and again made a prophecy to the effect
that Isaac Newton would some day take his own place and be master of
Grantham School.

In the year Sixteen Hundred Fifty-six the schooldays of Isaac Newton
were cut short by the death of his stepfather.

His mother, twice a widow, moved back to "Woolsthorpe," a big name for a
very small estate. Isaac was made the man of the house. The ambition of
his mother was that he should become a farmer and stock-raiser.

It seems that the boy entered upon his farm duties with an alacrity that
was not to last. His heart was not in the work, but the desire to please
his mother spurred him forward.

On one occasion, being sent with a load of produce to Grantham, he
stopped to visit his old school, and during his call struck a bargain
with one of the boys for a copy of Descartes' Geometry. The purchase
exhausted his finances, so that he was unable to buy the articles his
mother had sent him for, but when he got home he explained that one
might get along without such luxuries as clothing, but a good Geometry
was a family necessity. About this time he made a water-clock, and also
that sundial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the
corner of the house. He still continued his making of kites which had
been begun at Grantham; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by
flying kites at night with lighted lanterns made from paper, attached to
the tails. He made water-wheels and windmills, and once constructed a
miniature mill that he ran by placing a mouse in a treadmill inside.

In the meantime the cows got into the corn, and the weeds in the garden
improved each shining hour. The fond mother was now sorely disappointed
in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after
his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indulgent grandmother,
affairs at this time would not be in their present state. Parents are
apt to be fussy: they can not wait.

Matters reached a climax when the sheep that Isaac had been sent to
watch, overran the garden and demolished everything but the purslane and
ragweed, while all the time the young man was under the hedge working
out mathematical problems from his Descartes.

At this stage the mother called in her brother, the Reverend Mr.
Ayscough, and he advised that a boy who was so bound to study should be
allowed to study.

And the good man offered to pay the wages of a man to take Isaac's place
on the farm.

So, greatly to the surprise and pleasure of Mr. Stokes of Grantham,
Isaac one fine day returned with his books, just as if he had only been
gone a day instead of a year.

At the home of the apothecary the lad was thrice welcome. He had
endeared himself to the women of the household especially. He did not
play with other boys--their games and sports were absolutely outside of
his orbit. He was silent and so self-contained that he won from his
schoolfellows the sobriquet of "Old Coldfeet." Nothing surprised him; he
never lost his temper; he laughed so seldom that the incident was noted
and told to the neighbors; his attitude was one of abstraction, and when
he spoke it was like a judge charging a jury with soda-water.

All his spare time was given up to whittling, pounding, sawing, and
making mathematical calculations.

Not all of his inventions were toys, for among other things he
constructed a horseless carriage which was run by a crank and pumping
device, by the occupants.

The idea of the horseless carriage is a matter that has long been in the
minds of inventors.

Several men, supremely great, have tried their hands and head at it.
Leibnitz worked at it; Swedenborg prophesied the automobile, and made a
carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until
the horse ran away with himself and demolished a year's work. The
government here interfered and placed an injunction against "the making
of any more such diabolical contrivances for the disturbance of the
public peace." All of which makes us believe that if either Edison or
Marconi had lived two hundred years ago, the bailiffs would have looked
after them with the butt end of the law for the regulation of wizards
and witches--wizards at Menlo Park being as bad as witches at Salem.

Newton's horseless carriage later came to grief in a similar way to
Swedenborg's invention--it worked so well and so fast that it turned a
complete somersault into a ditch, and its manipulation was declared to
be a pastime more dangerous than football.

Not all the things produced by Isaac about this time were failures. For
instance, among other things he made a table, a chair and a cupboard for
a young woman who was a fellow-boarder at the apothecary's. The
excellence of young Newton's handiwork was shown in that the articles
just mentioned outlasted both owner and maker.

       *       *       *       *       *

Much of the reminiscence concerning the Grantham days of Sir Isaac
Newton comes from the fortunate owner of that historic old table, chair
and cupboard. This was Mary Story, who was later Mrs. Vincent.

Miss Story was the same age as Isaac. She was just eighteen when the
furniture was made roycroftie--she was a young lady, grown, and wore a
dress with a train; moreover, she had been to London and had been
courted by a widower, while Isaac Newton was only a lad in roundabouts.

Age counts for little--it is experience and temperament that weigh in
the scale. Isaac was only a little boy, and Mary Story treated him like
one. And here seems a good place to quote what Doctor Charcot said, "In
arranging the formula for a great man, make sure you delay adolescence:
rareripes rot early."

Isaac and Mary became very good chums, and used to ramble the woods
together hand in hand, in a way that must have frightened them both had
they been on the same psychic plane. Isaac had about the same regard for
her that he might have had for a dear maiden aunt who would mend his old
socks and listen patiently, pretending to be interested when he talked
of parallelograms and prismatic spectra. But evidently Mary Story
thought of him with a thrill, for she stoutly resented the boys calling
him "Coldfeet."

In due time Isaac gravitated to Cambridge. Mary mooed a wee, but soon
consoled herself with a sure-enough lover, and was married to Mr.
Vincent, a worthy man and true, but one who had not sufficient
soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac.

This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one
love-affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily Platonic
on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac
Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called
upon her, the relationship was certainly noteworthy.

The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past
fifty.

Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was
seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray,
and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat
talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic
equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he
absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco
died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in pushing the
ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand
resting upon his knee, and he straightway utilized the forefinger of his
vis-a-vis. A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires of
friendship were not quenched by so slight an incident, which Mrs.
Vincent knew grew out of temperament, and not from wrong intent.

She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the
scar--the cicatrice of a love-wound. All of which seems to prove that
old women can be quite as absurd as young ones--goodness me!

       *       *       *       *       *

When Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so well impressed with his
star scholar that he called in the young lad's uncle, the Reverend Mr.
Ayscough, and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle
being a Cambridge man himself thought this the proper thing to do.

On June Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-one, Isaac presented his
credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered in
Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on
suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub
floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else
evaded.

To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He
thirsted for knowledge: to know, to do, to perform--these things were
his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy
toil is no punishment. "I knew that if worse came to worst I could get
work in the town making furniture and earn a man's wage," he said.

In a month he had passed his first examinations and was made a sizar.
Before this he had been fag to everybody, but now he was fag to the
Seniors only. He not only made their beds and cleaned their rooms, but
also worked their examples in mathematics, and thus commanded their
respect.

Once, being called upon in class to recite from Euclid, he declined and
shocked the professor by saying, "It is a trifling book--I have
mastered it and thrown it aside." And it was no idle boast--he knew the
book as the professor did not. When he arrived at Cambridge, he carried
in his box a copy of Sanderson's Logic presented to him by his
uncle--the uncle having no use for it. It happened to be one of the
textbooks in use at Trinity. When Isaac heard lectures on Sanderson he
found he knew the book a deal better than the tutor, a thing the tutor
shortly acknowledged before the class. This caused young Mr. Newton to
stand out as a prodigy. Usually students have to rap for admittance to
the higher classes, but now the teachers came and sought him out. One
professor told him he was about to take up Kepler's Optics with some
post-graduate students--would young Mr. Newton come in? Isaac begged to
be excused until he could examine the book. The volume was loaned to
him. He tore the vitals out of it and digested them. When the lectures
began, he declined to go because he had mastered the subject as far as
Kepler carried it.

Genius seems to consist in the ability to concentrate your rays and
focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I
took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole
in my coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal.

The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness: he talked little, but
when he spoke it was very frankly and honestly. From any other his words
would have had a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was
respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and features commended him:
he looked like another Cambridge man, one Milton--John Milton--only his
face was a little more stern in its expression than that of the author
of "Paradise Lost."

In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar of whom all Cambridge
knew. He had prepared able essays on the squaring of curved and crooked
lines, on errors in grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them,
and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were imperfect: he had
done things never before attempted by his teachers. When they called
upon him to recite, it was only for the purpose of explaining truths
which they had not mastered.

In Sixteen Hundred Sixty-four, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac
Newton was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, books and
tuition. On this occasion he was examined in Euclid by Doctor Barrow,
the Head Master of Trinity.

Newton could solve every problem, but could not explain why or how. His
methods were empirical--those of his own.

Many men with a modicum of mathematical genius work in this way, and in
practical life the plan may serve all right. But now it was shown to
Newton that a schoolman must not only know how to work out great
problems, but also why he goes at it in a certain way; otherwise,
colleges are vain--we must be able to pass our knowledge along. The
really great man is one who knows the rules and then forgets them, just
as the painter of supreme merit must be a realist before he evolves into
an impressionist.

Newton now acknowledged his mistake in reference to Euclid, and set to
work to master the rules. This graciousness in accepting advice, and the
willingness to admit his lapse, if he had been hasty, won for him not
only the scholarship, but also the love of his superiors. Milton was a
radical who made enemies, but Newton was a radical who made friends. He
avoided iconoclasm, left all matters of theology to the specialists, and
accepted the Church as a necessary part of society. His care not to
offend fixed his place in Cambridge for life.

It was Cambridge that fostered and encouraged his first budding
experiments; it was there he was sustained in his mightiest hazards; and
it was within her walls that the ripe fruit of his genius was garnered
and gathered. When his fame had become national and he was called to
higher offices than Cambridge supplied, Cambridge watched his career
with the loving interest of a mother, and the debt of love he fully
paid, for it was very largely through his name and fame that Cambridge
first took her place as one of the great schools of the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Newton took his degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, in January, in
the year Sixteen Hundred Sixty-five. The faculty of Trinity would not
even consider his leaving the college: he was as valuable to them as he
would be now if he were a famous football-player. Besides the
scholarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private
tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of the professors.

He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to
fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of
curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was
given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epidemic,
and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, Sixteen
Hundred Sixty-five, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his
mother's garden, Newton saw that storied apple fall. What pulled it
down? Some force tugging at it, surely!

Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the
weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity,
save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the
atmosphere. The first person to put into print the story of the falling
apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the
world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each
had his little affair with an apple, but with different results.

The falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the
ground that was constantly pulling things toward the center of the
earth.

This power extended straight down into the earth--he knew it--he had
dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples.
He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and
he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would
return to earth.

He then began to speculate as to just what a body would do a thousand or
ten thousand miles from the earth. So high as we could go, or as deep as
we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of
Gravitation!

If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the
gunner had to elevate the aim if he would hit the target, for the ball
described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it struck
the ground. Something was pulling it down: what was it? The Law of
Gravitation!

The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for
the fact that there were other attractions drawing her toward them. The
movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying
attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in
motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball.

Newton had noticed that the stars within a certain territory all moved
in similar directions, and so must be acted upon by the same influences.
The Law of Gravitation!

It is held by many people in East Aurora and elsewhere that Newton's
invention is a devilish device originated for the benefit of surgeons
and crockery-dealers. But this is not wholly true.

Without this Law of Gravitation the Earth could not retain her spherical
shape: only through this constant drawing in toward the center could she
exist.

The other planets, too, must be round or they could not exist, and so
they also had this same quality of gravity in common with the Earth--a
drawing in of everything toward the center. Here was clearly a positive
discovery--this similarity of the heavenly bodies!

Every one of the heavenly bodies was exerting a constant attraction
toward all other heavenly bodies, and this attractive power must be in
proportion to the distance they were from the object acted upon. Thus
were their movements and orbits accounted for.

At this time Newton was perfectly familiar with Kepler's Law, that the
squares of the periodic times of a planet were as the cubes of its
distance from the sun. And from this, he inferred that the attraction
varied as the square of the planet's distance from the sun.

Here he was working on territory that had never been surveyed. At
first, in his exuberance, he thought to figure out the size and weight
of each planet quickly by measuring its attractive power. He did not
realize that he had cut out for himself work that would require many men
and several centuries to cover, but surely he was on the right scent--a
finite man keen upon the secrets of the Infinite!

He was still at his mother's old home in the country, without scientific
apparatus or the stimulus of colleagues, when we find by a record in his
journal that antique groan because there were only twenty-four hours in
a day, and that eight were required for sleep and eight more for
recreation!

A subject a little nearer home than planetary attraction had now
switched him off from measuring and weighing the stars. He was hard at
work in his mother's little sitting-room, with the windows darkened,
much to that good woman's perplexity.

By shutting out all light from the windows and allowing the sun's rays
to enter by a little, circular aperture, he had gotten the sunlight
captured and tamed where he could study it. This ray of light he
examined with a small hand-glass he himself had made. In looking at the
ray, quite accidentally, he found it could be deflected and sent off at
will in various directions. When thrown on the wall, instead of being
simply white light it had seven distinct colors beginning with violet
and running down to red. So white light was not a single element: it
was made up of various rays which had to be united in order to give us
sunlight.

Eureka! He had found the secret of the rainbow--the sun's rays broken up
and separated by the refracting agency of clouds!

Well does Darwin declare that the separation of sunlight into its
component parts, and the invention of the spectrum, have marked an
advance in man's achievement such as the world had not seen since the
time of wonder-working Archimedes.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Cambridge University was closed until October, year of Sixteen
Hundred Sixty-seven. Most of the intervening time Newton spent at the
home of his mother, but from accounts of his we can see that the College
people kept their eagle-eye upon him, for they sent remittances to him
regularly for "commons."

When he returned to Cambridge he was assigned to the "spiritual
chamber," which was a room next to the chapel, that had formerly been
reserved as a guest-room for visiting dignitaries.

In March, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, he was given the degree of Master
of Arts. His studies now were of a very varied kind. He was required to
give one lecture a week on any subject of his own choosing. Needless to
say his themes were all mathematical or scientific. Just what they were
can best be inferred by consulting his cashbook, since the lectures
themselves were not written out and all memoranda concerning them have
disappeared. This account-book shows that his expenditures were for a
Gunter's Book (he who invented the Gunter's Chain), a magnet and a
compass, glue, bulbs, putty, antimony, vinegar, white lead, salts of
tartar, and lenses.

And in addition there are a few interesting items such as one sees in
the Diary of George Washington: "Lost at cards, five shillings."
"Treating at tavern, ten shillings." "Binding my Bible, three
shillings." "Spent on my cousin, one pound, two." "Expenses for wetting
my degree, sixteen shillings."

The last item shows that times have changed but little: this scientist
and philosopher par excellence had to moisten his diploma at the tavern
for the benefit of good fellows who little guessed with whom they drank.

He also had "poor relations" come to visit him; and it is significant
that while there are various items showing where he lost money at cards,
there are no references to any money won at the same business, from
which we infer that while there was no one at Cambridge who could follow
him in his studies, there yet were those who could deal themselves
better hands when it came to the pasteboards.

Evidently he got discouraged at playing cards, for after the year
Sixteen Hundred Sixty-eight, there are no more items of "treating at the
tavern" or "lost at cards." The boys had tried to educate him, but had
not succeeded. In card exploitations he fell a victim of arrested
development.

I suppose it will not cause any one a shock to be told that "the
greatest thinker of all time" was not exactly a perfect man.

So let the truth be known that throughout his life Newton had a
well-defined strain of superstitious belief running through his
character. He never quite relinquished the idea of transmutation of
metals, and at times astrology was quite as interesting to him as
astronomy.

In writing to a friend who was about to pay a long visit to the mines of
Hungary, he says, "Examine most carefully and ascertain just how and
under what conditions Nature transforms iron into copper and copper into
silver and gold."

In his laboratory he had specimens of iron ore that contained copper,
and also samples of copper ore that contained gold, and from this he
argued that these metals were transmutable, and really in the act of
transmutation when the process was interfered with by the miner's pick.

He had transformed a liquid into a mass of solid crystals instantly, and
all of the changes possible in light, which he had discovered, had
enlarged his faith to a point where he declared, "Nothing is
impossible."

It is somewhat curious that Isaac Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment
in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and
astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy
of these things.

Galileo also saw at once that for the sun to stand still at Joshua's
command would really mean that the Earth must cease her motion, since
the object desired was to prolong the day. Sir Isaac Newton, who
discovered the Law of Gravitation, yet believed that at the command of a
barbaric chieftain, this Law was arrested, and that all planetary
attraction was made to cease while he fought the Philistines for the
possession of pasture-land to which he had no title.

Galileo did not know as much as Newton about planetary attraction, but
very early in his career he perceived that the Bible was not a book that
could be relied upon technically.

With Newton the Bible presented no difficulties. He regularly attended
church and took part in the ritual. Religion was one thing and his daily
work another. He kept his religion as completely separate from his life
as did Gladstone, who believed the Mosaic account of Creation was
literally true, and yet had a clear, cool, calculating head for facts.

The greatest financial exploiter in America today is an Orthodox
Christian, taking an active part in missionary work and the spread of
the Gospel.

In his family he is gentle, kind and tender; he is a good neighbor, a
punctilious churchgoer, a leader in Sunday-School, and a considerate
teacher of little children.

In business relations he is as conscienceless as Tamerlane, who built a
mountain of skulls as a monument to himself. He is cold, calculating,
and if opposed, vindictive. On occasion he is absolutely without heart:
compassion, mercy or generosity are not then in his make-up.

The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the
penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit.
Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train.
A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where
Cæsar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of
stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been
this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said
in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature: he
reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and
tenderly kisses his grandchildren good-night.

The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature,
and by habit are spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is
one man; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one
body.

Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his
call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips.

The natures of some men are divided up into water-tight compartments.
Sir Isaac Newton kept his religion in one compartment, and his science
in another--they never got together.

Voltaire has said, "When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of
Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but
they more than got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies
of the Bible."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected the Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, an office that carried with it a
goodly salary and also very much honor. Never before had so young a man
held this chair.

Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical properties of light.

Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton
first proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval.

When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought, it was regarded as
a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in
Germany and France, at once set about to show the fallacy of Newton's
conclusions.

Newton had issued a pamphlet with diagrams showing how to study light,
and the apparatus was so simple and cheap that the "Newton experiments"
were tried everywhere in schoolrooms.

People always combat a new idea when first presented, and so Newton
found himself overwhelmed with correspondence.

Cheap arguments were fired into Cambridge in volleys. These were backed
up by quibbling men--Pro Bono Publico, Veritas and Old Subscriber--men
incapable of following Newton's scientific mind. In his great
good-nature and patience Newton replied to his opponents at length.

His explanations were construed into proof that he was not sure of his
ground. One man challenged him to debate the matter publicly, and we
hear of his going up to London, king that he was, to argue with a
commoner.

Such terms as "falsifier," "upstart," "pretender," were freely used, and
poor Newton for a time was almost in despair.

He had thought that the world was anxious for truth! Some of his
fellow-professors now touched their foreheads and shook their heads
ominously as he passed. He had gone so far beyond them that the cries of
"whoa!" were unnoticed.

It is here worth noting that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was
brought about by his rancorous enemies, and not by his loving friends.
Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced
notoriety before he knew fame.

To the world at large he was a "wizard" and a "juggler" before he was
acknowledged a teacher of truth--a man of science.

When the dust of conflict concerning Newton's announcement of the
qualities of light had somewhat subsided, he turned to his former
discovery, the Law of Gravitation, and bent his mighty mind upon it. The
influence of the moon upon the Earth, the tilt of the Earth, the
flattening of the poles, the recurring tides, the size, weight and
distance of the planets, now occupied Newton's attention. And to study
these phenomena properly, he had to construct special and peculiar
apparatus.

In Sixteen Hundred Eighty-seven the results of his discoveries were
brought together in one great book, the "Principia." Newton was
forty-five years old then.

He was still the Cambridge professor, but was well known in political
circles in London on account of having been sent there at various times
to represent the University in a legal way.

His diplomatic success led to his being elected a member of Parliament.
Among other great men whom he met in London was Samuel Pepys, who kept a
diary and therein recorded various important nothings about "Mr. Isaac
Newton of Cambridge--a schoolteacher of degree, with a great dignity of
manner and pleasing Countenance." It seems Newton thought so well of
Pepys that he wrote him several letters, from which Samuel gives us
quotations. Pepys really claimed the honor of introducing Newton into
good society.

Among others with whom Newton made friends in Parliament was Mr.
Montague, who shortly afterward became Secretary of the Exchequer.
Montague made his friend Newton a Warden of the Mint, with pay about
double that which he had received while at Cambridge.

In this public work Newton brought such talent and diligence to bear
that in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-seven he was made Master of the Mint, at
a salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year--a princely sum in those days.

There is no doubt that the fact that Newton was a devout Churchman and
an upholder of the Established Order was a great, although perhaps
unconscious, diplomatic move.

His delightful personality--gracious, suave, dignified and silent--won
for him admiration wherever he would go. In argument his fine reserve
and excellent temper were most convincing. Had he turned his attention
to the law he would have become Chief Justice of England.

In Seventeen Hundred Three he was elected President of the Royal
Society, an office he held continuously for twenty-five years, and which
tenure was only terminated by his death.

In Seventeen Hundred Five the Queen visited Cambridge, and there with
much pageantry bestowed the honor of Knighthood which changed Professor
Newton into Sir Isaac Newton.

But the man himself was still the simple, modest gentleman. The title
did not spoil him--he was a noble man from boyhood.

His duties as Master of the Mint did not interfere with his studies and
scientific investigations. He revised and rewrote his "Principia," and
in Seventeen Hundred Thirteen the new edition was issued. One copy was
most sumptuously bound, and Sir Isaac, who was a special favorite at
Court, presented it in person to the Queen. Those who are interested in
such things may, by applying to the Curator of the British Museum, see
and turn the leaves of this book, reading the gracious inscription of
the author, while a solemn man in brass buttons stands behind.

Newton died March Twentieth, Seventeen Hundred Twenty-seven, at the age
of eighty-five, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The verdict of humanity concerning Sir Isaac Newton has been summed up
for us thus by Laplace: "His work was pre-eminent above all other
products of the human intellect."




[Illustration: GALILEO]

GALILEO


     I am inclined to believe that the intention of the Sacred
     Scriptures is to give to mankind the information necessary for
     their salvation.

     But I do not hold it necessary to believe that the same God who has
     endowed us with senses, with speech, with intellect, intended that
     we should neglect the use of these, and seek by other means for
     knowledge which these are sufficient to procure for us; especially
     in a science like astronomy, of which so little notice is taken by
     the Scriptures that none of the planets, except the sun and moon
     and once or twice only Venus, by the name of Lucifer, are so much
     as named at all.

     This therefore being granted, methinks that in the discussion of
     natural problems we ought not to begin at the authority of texts of
     Scriptures but at sensible experiments and necessary
     demonstrations.

     --_Galileo_


GALILEO

With the history of Galileo and Copernicus, there is connected a
man of such stern and withal striking individuality that the story of
the rise and evolution of astronomy can not be told and this man's name
left out. Giordano Bruno was born in Fifteen Hundred Forty-eight. His
parents were obscure people, and his childhood and early education are
enveloped in mystery. Occasional passages in his writings refer to his
sympathy for outcast children, and he quotes the saying of Jesus,
"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven." He then refers to himself as having been
a waif and robbed of the love that was his due, "the lawful, legal
heritage of every child, sent without its consent into a world of
struggle and strife, where only love makes existence possible."

Evidently, the early life of Bruno was a symbol and shadow of what Fate
held in store for him.

The first authentic knowledge we have of Bruno was when he was
twenty-two years old. He was then a Dominican monk, and he is brought to
our attention because he distinguished himself by incurring the
displeasure of his superiors. His particular offense was that he had
declared, "The infallibility of the Pope is only in matters spiritual,
and does not apply to the science of material things."

Strangely enough, these words of Bruno are almost identical with words
recently expressed by Cardinal Satolli.

The difference in their reception is owing to a mere matter of a few
hundred years. Truth is a question of time and place. Bruno was banished
for his temerity, and Satolli wears the red hat. Verily, yesterday's
heresy is today's orthodoxy.

       *       *       *       *       *

The attitude of the Church toward the teachings of Copernicus, after the
death of the man, was one of patronizing pity.

Instead of putting his great book, "Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,"
on the "Index," the wiser plan was adopted of paying no attention to it.
Occasionally, however, the subject was broached by some incautious
novitiate, and then the custom was to treat the Copernican Theory as a
mere hypothesis, and its author as a mental defective.

Bruno would not have it so. To him it was a very important matter
whether the sun revolved around the earth as the priests taught, or the
earth revolved around the sun as set forth in the work of Copernicus. He
came to the conclusion that Copernicus was right, and said so.

It was ordered that he should cease lecturing on the subject of
astronomy and apply himself to spiritual matters. He argued that he
should be allowed to think and speak what he pleased about the stars,
since the whole matter was one of opinion, and even the Pope did not
know, positively, the final facts of astronomy, and if the Copernican
Theory was a hypothesis, so also was the Ptolemaic Theory held by the
Church.

It will be seen that Copernicus and Bruno were very different in
temperament: one was gentle, diplomatic, cautious; the other was
headstrong, firm and full of argument.

Bruno was given his choice: to cease the study of astronomy or to lay
aside the Dominican frock. The hardihood of the young man was seen in
that he unfrocked himself, thinking that once outside of the order he
was not responsible to a superior and could teach what he pleased, so
long as it was not "heresy."

Heresy is treason to the Church, but Bruno could not see how spiritual
dogma could cover the facts of Physical Science, since new facts were
constantly being discovered, and the material universe could only be
understood by being studied. He was too innocent to comprehend that a
vast majority of the people believed that popes, cardinals and priests
knew everything, and that when any branch of knowledge was questioned it
placed the priests in doubt. Certainly the Church has not opposed
Science--she has only opposed heresy. But the curious fact is that
advancing Science has usually been to the Church heretical. When Bruno
opposed anything that the priests taught, he opposed the Church. He was
warned to leave Rome--his life was in danger. He fled to Geneva, the
home of Calvin.

Here he thought, surely, he could speak and write as he chose. But alas!
Protestantism cared even less about Science than did the monks, and
"heresy" to John Calvin was quite as serious a matter as it was to
Calvin's competitor, the Pope of Rome.

The Protestants of Geneva gave Bruno scant attention; they had never
heard of Copernicus, and the movements of the stars were as nothing to
them, since the world was soon to come to an end.

The learned men were even then making mathematical calculations, based
on the prophecies of the Old Testament, as to how soon the general
destruction would take place.

Bruno sought to argue them out of their childishness, with the result
that he got himself marked as an infidel and a dangerous man.

From Geneva he went to Lyons, then to Paris, where his personality made
itself felt, and he was given a hearing at the University. Here he
remained for several years, when he went to England, arriving there in
Fifteen Hundred Eighty-four, the same year that a rustic by the name of
William Shakespeare, from Stratford, reached London. Whether they ever
met is doubtful.

Bruno spoke five languages, and his polite accomplishments afforded him
an immediate entry into the best circles of society. He was entertained
at the home of Sir Philip Sidney, and afterward carried on an extensive
correspondence with this prince of gentlemen. Greville presented Bruno
to Queen Elizabeth, who invited him to lecture at the Court on his
favorite theme.

This he did, and it is quite probable that the noble lords and ladies
left "calls" so they could be awakened when the lecture was over and
congratulate the speaker of the evening on his effort.

At Oxford there were disputations where Bruno's faultless Latin
impressed the pedants much more than did his argument, so they offered
him a position as Professor of Languages, but this he smilingly
declined, excusing himself on the grounds that he had important business
on the Continent: and he had. Already they were collecting fagots for
his benefit.

He returned to Paris and began his lecturing on Science. His arguments
had convinced one person at least, and that was himself, that as the
Church knew nothing of Physical Science, why, possibly it stood in a
like position regarding spiritual truth. That is to say, the so-called
"sacred truths" were mere assumptions piled up to satisfy the people,
and the ignorance and superstition of the many marked high water for the
teaching of the priests. The business of the Church was to satisfy the
people, and not enlighten them, for if the people became enlightened
enough they would see that they did not need the Church, and then where
were the honors and the riches and the red hats!

Bruno cleared his mind of its cobwebs by expression, just as we all
do--that is what expression is for.

The people really dictate to the priests what they shall teach;
moreover, the people absolutely refuse to listen to anything in which
they do not believe, and decline to pay for preaching that is not done
to their own dictation. The business, then, of the Church is to study
carefully the ignorance of the people and conform to it. On this one
thing does its stability depend. Therefore it must, as a matter of
self-preservation, suppress any chance intellect that is ahead of its
time, lest this man honeycomb the whole structure of churchly dogma.

Bruno said that, just as the world seemed to stand still and the stars
move around us, so did the Church seem to most people a fixed fact. But
exactly the opposite was true; the Church moves as the people move, and
unless men outside of the Church educate the people, or the people
educate themselves, they will forever remain in darkness.

Bruno offered to debate the question publicly with the Bishop of Paris.
That worthy was no match for Bruno in point of oratory, but when we can
not answer a man's reasons, all is not lost, for we can at least call
him vile names, and this is often quite as effectual as logic.

The Bishop launched a fusillade of theological lyddite at Bruno,
declaring that any Churchman who would so much as hold converse with
such a wretch was disgraced forever, and that the propositions Bruno
wished to argue were unthinkable to a self-respecting man. He declared
that it was only the mercy of God that kept the lightning from striking
Bruno dead as he wrote his heresies.

Matters were getting strained, and the authorities, fearing
insurrection, acted upon the advice of the good Bishop and expelled
Bruno from France. He went to Wittenberg, in his innocence, intending to
tack on the church-door there his theses. But Wittenberg had no use for
Bruno--he believed too much, or too little, Luther could not tell which.

The University of Zurich now offered to let the exile come there and
teach what he wished. Thither he journeyed and there his restless mind
seemed for the first time to find a home. His writings were slowly
making head, and around him there clustered a goodly group of students
who believed in him and loved him.

In the midst of this oasis in a troubled life, word came from some of
the old-time friends he had known in Rome. They were now in Venice, and
wished to have him come there and lecture. Bruno thought that his little
leaven was leavening the whole lump--he was not without ambition--he was
flattered by the invitation. He accepted it and went to Venice.

It was simply a ruse to get the man within striking distance. Very soon
after his arrival in Venice he was arrested by agents of the Inquisition
and secretly taken to Rome. He was lodged in a dungeon of the Castle
Saint Angelo. Just what his experience was there we can not say--the
horrors of it all are not ours, for no friend of Bruno's was allowed to
approach, and what he there wrote was destroyed.

We do know, however, that he was asked to recant, and we know he
refused. We also know that he repeated his heresies and hurled back
into the teeth of his accusers the invective they heaped upon him.

Bribery, persuasion, threat and torture were tried in turn, but all in
vain, for Bruno would not swerve. Unlike Savonarola his quivering flesh
could not wring from his heart an apology.

He scorned the rack and thumbscrew, declaring they could not reach his
soul. He knew that death would be the end; he prayed for it, and even
thought to hasten it by an aggravating manner and harshness of speech
toward his captors, seemingly quite unnecessary.

For seven long years he was in prison. He was burned alive on the
Seventh of February, Sixteen Hundred, aged fifty-two.

When bound to the stake he turned his face from the crucifix that was
held before him, and sought to kiss the fagots. His ashes were thrown to
the four winds. Thus perished Bruno.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the year Fifteen Hundred Sixty-four, Galileo Galilei was born;
consequently, he was thirty-six years old when Bruno was executed. He
had known Bruno, had attended many of his lectures, and had followed his
career with interest; and while he agreed with him concerning the
Copernican theory of the earth's revolution, he took exceptions to
Bruno's arbitrary ways of presenting the matter, and also to his
scathing criticisms of theology. At this time Galileo could not see that
the extravagant words of Bruno were largely forced from him by the
violence of the opposition he had encountered. Galileo fully believed
that Bruno had been put to death for treason to the Church, and not on
account of his astronomical teachings.

These men had come up from totally different stations in life. Bruno was
a man of the people--a self-made man--who bore upon his person the marks
of the hammer. Galileo was of noble blood, and traced an ancestry to a
Gonfalonier of Florence. From early infancy he had enjoyed association
with polite persons, and had sat on the knees of greatness.

When eighteen he was graduated from the University of Pisa; and at that
early age his family and friends were comparing him, not without reason,
to a Genius who had come out of Tuscany some years before, Leonardo da
Vinci.

Parents either exaggerate the talents of their children or else
belittle them. The woman who bore George Gordon called him "that lame
brat"; but we call him "The Poet Byron."

Benjamin Franklin ran away from home, and his family thought themselves
disgraced by his printed utterances. George Washington's mother, after
being told that her son had been made Commander-in-Chief, laughed
knowingly and said, "They don't know him as well as I do!" Voltaire's
father posted his son as irresponsible, tied up a legacy so "the
scapegrace could not waste it," invested good money in daily prayers to
be said for the scapegrace's salvation, and then died of a broken heart,
just as play-actors do on the stage, only this man died sure enough.
Alfred Tennyson at thirteen wrote a poem addressed to his grandfather;
the old gentleman gave him a guinea for it, and then wrote these words:
"This is the first and last penny you will ever receive for writing
poetry." The father of Shelley misquoted Job, and said, "Oh, to be
brought down to the grave in grief through the follies of an ungrateful
child!" And Labouchere says that one of the four brothers of Shakespeare
used to explain that he wasn't the play-actor who wrote "Hamlet" and
"Othello," lest, mayhap, his name should be smirched.

Galileo's mother had that beautiful dream which I believe all good
mothers have: that her son might be the savior of the world. As he grew
to manhood, her faith in him did not relax.

In childhood Galileo showed great skill in invention. He made curious
toys with cogs and wheels and eccentrics; whittled out violins, and
transformed simple reeds into lutes, upon which he played music of his
own composition. In fact, so great was his skill in music that at twenty
they wished to make him official organist and choirmaster of the
Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting; for some
months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long.
If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was
surely young Galileo. The Archbishop of Pisa said, "Upon him has fallen
the mantle of Michelangelo."

He gave lectures on Art, and taught Painting by actual example. One of
his pupils, and a great artist, Lodovico Cigoli, always maintained that
it was to the inspiration and counsel of Galileo that he owed his
success.

There are really only two things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning
Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his
most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the
visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted
ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this
church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), he
noticed that there was a slight swinging motion to this lamp--it was
never still. Galileo set to work timing and measuring these
oscillations, and he found that they were always done in exact measure
and in perfect rhythm. This led, some years later, to perfecting an
astronomical clock for measuring movements of the stars. And from this
was originated the pendulum-clock, where before we had depended on
sundials.

The endeavor of Galileo's parents had been to keep him ignorant of
mathematics and practical life, that he might blossom forth as a saint
who would sing and play and make pictures like those of Leonardo, and
carve statues like Michelangelo, only better.

But parents plan, and Fate disposes.

In Fifteen Hundred Eighty-three, Ostilio Ricci, the famous
mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and
gave a lecture at the Court, on Geometry.

Galileo was not interested in the theme, but he was in the speaker, and
so he attended the lecture.

This action proved one of the pivotal points in his life.

"Whether other people really teach us anything, is a question," says
Stanley Hall; "but they do sometimes give us impulses, and make us find
out for ourselves."

Ricci made Galileo find out for himself.

He turned to Archimedes from Plato. Geometry became a passion, and a
very wise man has told us that we never accomplish anything, either good
or bad, without passion. Passion means one hundred pounds of steam on
the boiler, with love sitting on the safety-valve, when the blow-off is
set for fifty.

It surely is risky business, I will admit; accidents will occur
occasionally and explosions sometimes happen, but everything is risky,
even life, since few get out of it alive.

And so, to drop back to the original proposition, nothing great and
sublime is ever done without passion.

Galileo had his mechanical whooping-cough, musical mumps, artistic
measles, and now the hectic flush of mathematics burned on his cheeks.
He talked and dreamed mathematics.

Euclid was in the saddle.

Ricci became interested in the talented young scholar and remained
longer at Pisa than he had intended, that they might sit up all night
and surprise the rising sun, discussing beauties of dimensions and the
wonders of dynamics.

Together they went to Florence, where Ricci introduced his pupil as a
pedagogic sample of the goods, just as Booker Washington usually takes
with him on his travels a few ebony homo bricks as his specimens from
Tuskegee.

The beauty and the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the
abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything
interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the
broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the
contrary, notwithstanding.

Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a
Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice.

The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno--and surely it was
nobody's else. He gave its size, height, weight, and told how to reach
it.

He gave lectures on the Hydrostatic Balance and the Centers of Gravity,
and then published them as serials.

The Florentines crowned him with bay and enthusiastically proclaimed
him, "The Modern Archimedes."

       *       *       *       *       *

Pisa now put forth efforts to have her gifted son come home. There was
always rivalry between Pisa and Florence. Pisa could not afford to
supply Florence her men of genius--let her depend upon production from
home, or go without.

Galileo became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a
life position, or at least one he could hold during good behavior.

One of the time-honored dictums of the day was that falling bodies fell
with a velocity proportioned to their weight. The question was first
thrashed out in the classroom; and after Galileo had slyly gotten all of
these scientific wiseacres to commit themselves, he invited them, with
their students, to the Leaning Tower.

Then he proved by ocular demonstrations that they were positively wrong.

It is very beautiful to teach Truth, but error should not be corrected
with too much eclat. If the love of Truth, alone, was the guiding
impulse of Galileo, he might have secretly explained his theory to one
of the wiseacres, and this wiseacre could have casually demonstrated it,
so all the rest could have said, "That is what we always knew and
taught."

Instead of this, Galileo compelled the entire faculty to back water and
dine on fricasseed crow.

They got even by calling him "a scientific bastardino," and at his next
lecture he was roundly hissed. Soon after he was bluntly informed that
his office was to teach the young, and not to undo the old.

And that is the way the troubles of Galileo began.

He might then have apologized, and slipped back into peace and obscurity
and later been tucked in by kind oblivion. But he had tasted blood, and
the rabies of setting straight the scientific world, for its own good,
was upon him.

That he was wrong in the correction of his elders, he would not for a
moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not
sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon
after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat
invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile
ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and
its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land,
as into the hull of the enemy.

He also decorated his argument with a few subtle touches as to the
beauty of fighting battles without going to war and risking life and
limb.

Men who are not kind to the faults of royalty can hope for small favor
in a monarchy, though the monarchy be a republic. Galileo was cut off
the Standard Oil payroll, and forced to apply to a teachers' agency,
that he might find employment.

He did not wait long; the rival University of Padua tendered him a
position on a silver platter; and the Paduans made much dole about how
unfortunate it was that men could not teach Truth in Italy, save at
Padua--alas! The Governing Board of Padua made a great stroke in
securing Galileo, and Pisa fell back on her Leaning Tower as her chief
attraction.

From a position of mediocrity, the University of Padua gradually rose to
one of worldwide celebrity. Galileo remained at Padua from Fifteen
Hundred Ninety-two to Sixteen Hundred Ten, which years are famous not
alone through the wonderful inventions of Galileo, but because in that
same interval of time, at least thirty of Shakespeare's thirty-seven
plays were written. Surely, God was smiling on the planet Earth!

Galileo's salary was raised every year, starting at two hundred florins,
until it reached over one thousand florins, not to mention the numerous
gifts from grateful pupils, old and young. Students came to Padua from
all over the world to hear Galileo's lectures.

Starting with only a common classroom, the audience increased so fast
that a special auditorium was required that would seat two thousand
persons. It was during this time that Galileo invented the proportional
compasses, an instrument now in use everywhere, without the slightest
change having been made in it.

He also invented the thermometer; but greatest, best and most wonderful
of all, he produced an instrument through which he could view the stars,
and see them much magnified. With this instrument, he saw heavenly
bodies that had never been seen before; he beheld that Jupiter had
satellites which moved in orbits, and that Venus revolved, showing
different sides at different times, thus proving that which Copernicus
declared was true, but which, for lack of apparatus, he could not prove.

Galileo Galilei was getting to be more than a professor of
mathematics--he was becoming a power in the world.

The lever of his mighty mind was indeed finding a fulcrum.

       *       *       *       *       *

The year Sixteen Hundred Nine is forever fixed in history, through the
fact that in that year Galileo invented the telescope.

Every good thing is an evolution. "Specilla," or helps to read, had been
made, and sold privately and mysteriously, as early as the year Fourteen
Hundred. These first magnifying-glasses were associated with magic, or
wonder-working; the words "magnify" and "magic" having a common source
and a similar meaning. Magicians wore big square glasses, and by their
aid, some of them claimed to see things at a great distance; and also to
perceive things stolen, hidden or lost. Occasionally, the magician would
persuade his customer to try on the glasses, and then even common men
could see for themselves that there was something in the
scheme--goodness me! The use of spectacles was at first confined
entirely to these wonder-workers--or men who magnified things forever.
During the Fifteenth Century, public readers and occasionally priests
wore spectacles. To read was a miracle to most people, and a book was a
mysterious and sacred thing--or else a diabolical thing. The populace
would watch the man put on his "specillum," and the idea was everywhere
abroad that the magic glasses gave an ability to read; and that anybody
who was inspired by angels, or devils, who could get hold of spectacles,
could at once read from a book.

We hear of one magician who, about the year Fifteen Hundred, made a box
with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would
catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in
the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown
enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just
taking off and putting on the cover of the box!

This individual worked wonders for a consideration, but Fate overtook
him and he was smothered under a feather bed for having too much wizard
in his cosmos. A wizard, be it known, is a male witch, and the Bible
says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," although it does not say
anything about wizards.

But please note this: the wizard who had that magic box and flea had
really the first microscope.

Galileo bought a pair of "magic glasses," or spectacles, about the year
Sixteen Hundred Seven; and his action, in so doing, was freely
criticized.

On a visit to Venice, where glass had been manufactured since long
before the Flood, Galileo was looking through one of the
glass-factories, just as visitors do now, and one of the workmen showed
him a peculiar piece of glass which magnified the hairs on the back of
his hand many times.

In a very few days after this, Galileo heard that a Dutch
spectacle-maker had placed certain queer-shaped pieces of glass in a
tube, and offered to sell this tube to the Government, so by its use,
soldiers could see the movements of an enemy many miles away.

That night Galileo did not close his eyes in sleep. He thought out a
plan by which he could place pieces of glass in a tube, and bring the
stars close to the earth. By daylight the whole plan was clear in his
mind, and he hastened to the shop of the glassmakers.

There, two lenses were made, one plano-convex, and the other
plano-concave, and these were placed in a tube made of sheet copper. It
was tested on distant objects; and behold! they were magnified by three.
Would this tube show the stars magnified? Galileo knew of no reason why
it should not, but he paced his room in hot impatience, waiting for the
night to come with its twinkling wonders, that he might verify his
convictions. When the first yellow star appeared in the West, Galileo
turned his tube upon it, and behold! instead of twinkling points of
light, he saw a round mass--a world--moving through space, and not a
scintillating object with five points. The twinkling spikes, or points,
were merely an optical illusion of the unaided senses.

Galileo made no secret of his invention. It was called "Galileo's Tube,"
but some of the priests called it Galileo's "Magic Tube."

Yet it marked an era in the scientific world. Galileo endeavored
constantly to improve his instrument; and from a threefold magnifying
power, he finally made one that magnified thirty-two times.

Galileo made hundreds of telescopes, and sold them at moderate prices to
any one who would buy. He explained minutely the construction of the
instrument, showing clearly how it was made in accordance with the
natural laws of optics. His desire was to dissipate the superstition
that there was something diabolical or supernatural about the "Magic
Tube"--that, in fact, it was not magic, and the operator had no peculiar
powers; you had simply to comply with the laws of Nature, and any one
could see for himself.

It is hard for us, at this day, to understand the opposition that sprang
up against the telescope. We must remember that at this time belief in
witchcraft, fairies, sprites, ghosts, hobgoblins, magic and supernatural
powers was common. Men who believe in miracles make rather poor
scientists.

There were books about "Magic," written by so-called scientific men,
whose standing in the world was quite as high as that of Galileo.

In Sixteen Hundred Ten, Galileo published his book entitled, "Sidera
Medicea," wherein he described the wonders that could be seen in the
heavens by the aid of the telescope. Among other things, he said the
Milky Way was not a great streak of light, but was composed of a
multitude of stars; and he made a map of the stars that could be seen
only with the aid of the telescope.

There resided in Venice at this time a scientific man by the name of
Porta, who was much more popular than Galileo. He was a priest, whose
piety and learning was unimpeached.

The year after Galileo issued his book, Porta put out a work much more
pretentious, called "Natural Magic." In this book Porta does not claim
that magicians all have supernatural powers; but he goes on to prove how
they deceive the world by the use of their peculiar apparatus, and
intimates that they sometimes sell their souls to the Devil, and then
are positively dangerous. He dives deep into science, history and his
own imagination to prove things.

The man was no fool--he constructed a kaleidoscope that showed an
absolute, geometrical symmetry, where in fact there was only confusion.
He showed how, by the use of mirrors, things could be made big, small,
tall, short, wide, crooked or distorted. He told of how magicians, by
the use of Galileo's Tube, could show seven stars where there was only
one; and he even made such a tube of his own and called the priests
together to look through it. He painted stars on the glass, and had men
look at the heavens. He even stuck a louse on the lens and located the
beast in the heavens, for the benefit of a doubting Cardinal. It was all
a joke, but at the time no sober, sincere man of Science could argue him
down. He owned "bum" telescopes that proved all kinds of things, to the
great amusement of the enemies of Galileo. The intent of Porta was to
expose the frauds and fallacies of Galileo. Porta also claimed that he
had seen telescopes by which you could look over a hill and around a
corner, but he did not recommend them, since by their use things are
often perceived that were not there. And so we see why the priests
positively refused to look through Galileo's Tube, or to believe
anything he said. Porta, and a few others like him, showed a deal more
than Galileo could and offered to locate stars anywhere on order.
Galileo had much offended these priests by his statements that the Bible
did not contain the final facts of Science, and now they were getting
even with a vengeance. It was all very much like the theological guffaw
that swept over Christendom when Darwin issued his "Origin of Species,"
and Talmage and Spurgeon set their congregations in a roar by gently
sarcastic references to monkey ancestry.

       *       *       *       *       *

Amid the general popping of theological small-arms, Galileo moved
steadily forward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As
he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing
to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate.

Venice too was getting uncomfortable. Even the Doge said, in reply to an
enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, "Your master is not famous: he is
merely notorious."

It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name
of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at
Padua, and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, and two daughters. One
of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, showing Galileo as the sun,
Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little
satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so
great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be
destroyed.

Of Marina Gamba we know very little; but the fact that she made entries
in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts proves that she was a person
of considerable intelligence; and this, too, was at a time when
semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was supposedly beyond the
feminine grasp.

Galileo did not marry, for the reason that he was practically a priest,
a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the
pupils; and the custom then was that whoever was engaged in such an
occupation should not wed.

The stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are
advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends.
Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence
would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence
under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time to
Science.

In giving up schoolteaching and popular lecturing, Galileo really made a
virtue of necessity. No orthodox lyceum course would tolerate him; he
was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon and the
melodramatic were out of his line, and his passion for truth made him
impossible to the many.

He was treading the path of Bruno: the accusations, the taunts and
jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly
earnestness.

Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satellites of Jupiter
until he had made an instrument that would create them; and if God had
intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would
have supplied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a
devil's instrument.

Still another man declared that if the earth moved, acorns falling from
a high tree would all fall behind the tree and not directly under it.

Father Brini said that if the earth revolved, we would all fall off of
it into the air when it was upside down; moreover, its whirling through
space would create a wind that would sweep it bald.

Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, "Ye men of Galilee, why
stand ye gazing up into heaven?" Only he changed the word "Galilee" to
"Galileo," claiming it was the same thing, only different, and as reward
for his wit he was made a bishop.

Cardinal Bellarmine, a man of great energy, earnest, zealous, sincere,
learned--the Doctor Buckley of his day--showed how that: "if the
Copernican Theory should prevail, it would be the absolute undoing of
the Bible, and the destruction of the Church, rendering the death of
Christ futile. If the earth is only one of many planets, and not the
center of the universe, and the other planets are inhabited, the whole
plan of salvation fails, since the inhabitants of the other spheres are
without the Bible, and Christ did not die for them." This was the
argument of Father Lecazre, and many others who took their cue from him.

Galileo was denounced as "atheist" and "infidel"--epithets that do not
frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really
great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to
masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath
and hate against which it was vain to argue.

The Archbishop of Pisa especially felt it incumbent upon him "to bring
Galileo to justice."

Galileo was born at Pisa, educated there, taught in the University; and
now he had disgraced the place and brought it into disrepute.

Galileo was still in communication with teachers at Pisa, and the
Archbishop made it his business to have letters written to Galileo
asking certain specific questions. One man, Castelli, declined to be
used for the purpose of entrapping Galileo, but others there were who
loaned themselves to the plan.

In Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, Galileo received a formal summons from Pope
Paul the Fifth to come to Rome and purge himself of heresies that he had
expressed in letters which were then in the hands of the Inquisition.

Galileo appealed to his friends at Florence, but they were powerless.
When the Pope issued an order, it could not be waived. The greatest
thinker of his time journeyed to Rome and faced the greatest theologian
of his day, Cardinal Bellarmine.

The Cardinal firmly and clearly showed Galileo the error of his way.
Galileo offered to prove for the Cardinal by astronomical observations
that the Copernican Theory was true. Cardinal Bellarmine said that there
was only one truth and that was spiritual truth. That the Bible was
true, or it was not. If not, then was religion a fallacy and our hope of
Heaven a delusion.

Galileo contended that the death of Christ had nothing to do with the
truth, so Science and these things should not be shuffled and confused.

This attitude of mind greatly shocked the Inquisitors, and they made
haste to inform the Pope, who at once issued an order that the
astronomer should be placed in a dungeon until he saw fit to disavow
that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth moves.

A sort of compromise, it seems, was here effected by Galileo's promise
not to further teach that the earth revolves.

He was kept at Rome under strict surveillance for some months, but was
finally allowed to return to Florence, and cautioned that he must cease
all public teaching, speaking and writing on the subject of astronomy.
On March Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixteen, the consulting theologians of
the Holy Office reiterated that the propositions of Galileo, that the
sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth has a rotary
motion, were "absurd in philosophy, heretical, and also contrary to
Scripture."

The works of Copernicus were then placed upon the "Index," and Pope Paul
issued a special decree, warning all Churchmen to "abjure, shun and
forever abstain from giving encouragement, support, succor or friendship
to any one who believed or taught that the earth revolves."

The name of Copernicus was not removed from the "Index" until the year
Eighteen Hundred Eighteen.

       *       *       *       *       *

Galileo made his way back to Florence, defeated and disappointed. He had
not been tortured, except mentally, but he had heard the dungeon-key
turned in the big lock and felt the humiliation of being made a captive.
The instruments of torture had been shown to him, and he had heard the
cries of the condemned.

The cell that Bruno had occupied was his, and he was also taken to the
spot where Bruno was burned: the place was there, but where was Bruno!

He realized how utterly impossible it was to teach truth to those who
did not desire truth, and the vanity of replying to men for whom a pun
answered the purposes of fact.

As he could neither teach nor lecture at Florence, his services to the
Court were valueless. He was a disgraced and silenced man.

He retired to a village a few miles from the city, and in secret
continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a
small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would
give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes,
and try to make himself either commonplace or amusing.

We can imagine the reply--Galileo had but one theme, the wonders of the
heavens above.

       *       *       *       *       *

So the years went by, and Galileo, sixty-seven years old, was
impoverished and forgotten, yet in his proud heart burned the embers of
ambition. He believed in himself; he believed in the sacredness of his
one mission. Pope Paul had gone on his long journey, for even infallible
popes die. Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban the Eighth. Years
before, Galileo and Barberini had taught together at Padua, and when
Galileo was silenced, a long letter of sympathy had come from his old
colleague, and occasionally since they had exchanged friendly letters.
Galileo thought that Urban was his friend, and he knew that Urban, in
his heart, believed in the theory of Copernicus.

Galileo then emerged from his seclusion and began teaching and speaking
in Florence. He also fitted up an observatory and invited the scholars
to make use of his telescope.

Father Melchior hereupon put forth a general denunciation, aimed
especially at Galileo, without mentioning his name, to this effect: "The
opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable,
the most pernicious, the most scandalous: the immovability of the earth
is thrice sacred.

"An argument against the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul would be sooner tolerated than the idea that the earth moves."

In reply to this fusillade, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two Galileo put
forth his book entitled, "The Dialogue," which was intended to place the
ideas of Copernicus in popular form.

Galileo had endeavored to communicate with Urban, but the Pope had
chosen to ignore him--to consider him as one dead. Galileo misconstrued
the silence, thinking it meant that he could do and say what he wished
and that there would be no interference.

A copy of Galileo's book reaching the Pope, his silence was at once
broken. The book was condemned and all copies found were ordered to be
burned by the hangman in the public streets. But the book had met with a
wide sale and many copies had been carried to Germany, England and
France, and in these countries the work was reprinted and sent back to
Italy.

Urban ordered Galileo to present himself at Rome forthwith. A score of
years had passed since Galileo's former visit--he had not forgotten it.

He wrote to the Pope and apologized for having broken the silence
imposed upon him by Pope Paul; he offered to go into retirement again;
stated that he was old, infirm, without funds, and excused himself from
obeying the order to go to Rome.

But excuses and apologies were unavailing.

A preventory order was issued and sent to the Papal Nuncio at Florence.

This was equivalent to an arrest. Galileo must go to Rome and answer for
having broken the promises he had made to the Inquisition. If he would
not go willingly, he should go in chains.

Arriving at Rome, he had several audiences with the Pope, who said
nothing would answer but a specific recantation.

What Barberini had once believed was one thing, and what the Pope must
do was another. Galileo should recant in order to keep the people from
thinking Pope Urban would allow what his predecessors would not.

The matter had become a public scandal.

Galileo tried to argue the question and asked for time to consider it.

An order was issued that he should be imprisoned. It was done.

Galileo asked for pens and paper that he might prepare his defense.
These were refused, and an order of torture was issued. It was not a
trial, defense was useless. Again he was asked to recant--the matter was
all written out--he had but to sign his name. He refused. He was brought
to the torture-chamber.

Legend and fact separate here.

There are denials from Churchmen that Galileo was so much as imprisoned.
One writer has even tried to show that Galileo was a guest of the Pope
and dined daily at his table. The other side has told us that Galileo
was thrust into a dungeon, his eyes put out, and his old broken-down
form tortured on the wheel.

Recent careful researches reveal that neither side told the truth. We
have official record of the case written out at the time for the
Vatican archives. Galileo was imprisoned and the order of torture
issued, but it was never enforced. Perhaps it was not the intention to
enforce it: it may have been only a "war measure."

Galileo was alternately taken from dungeon to palace that he might
realize which course was best for him to pursue--oppose the Church or
uphold it.

Thus we see that there was some truth in the statement that "he dined
daily with the Pope."

That the man was subjected to much indignity, all the world now knows.
The official records are in the Vatican, and the attempt to conceal them
longer is out of the question. Wise Churchmen no longer deny the
blunders of the past, but they say with Cardinal Satolli, "The enemies
of the Church have ever been o'er-zealous Churchmen."

On bended knees, Galileo, a man of threescore and ten, broken in health,
with spirit crushed, repeated after a priest these words: "I, Galileo
Galilei, being in my seventieth year, a prisoner, on my knees before
your Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy See, having before mine eyes
the Holy Bible, which I touch with my hands and kiss with my lips, do
abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the
earth."

He also was made to sign the recantation. On arising from his knees,
legend declares that he said, "Yet the earth does move!"

It is hardly probable that the words reached his lips, although they may
have been in his mind. But we must remember the man's heart was broken,
and he was in a mental condition where nothing really mattered. To
complete his dishonor, all of his writings were placed on the "Index,"
and he was made to swear that he would inform the Inquisition of any man
whom he should hear or discover supporting the heresy of the motion of
the earth. The old man was then released, a prisoner on parole, and
allowed to make his way home to Florence, which he did by easy stages,
helped along the way by friendly monks who discussed with him all
questions but those of astronomy.

Galileo's eldest daughter, a nun, whose home was near his, was so
affected by the humiliation of her father that she fell into a nervous
decline and died very soon after he reached home.

Between these two there had been a close bond of love and tender
sympathy, and her death seemed almost the crowning calamity.

But once back in his village home at Arcetri, Galileo again went to work
with his telescope, mapping the heavens.

A goodly degree of health and animation came back to him, but his
eyesight, so long misused, now failed him and he became blind. Thus John
Milton found him in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-eight.

Castelli, his lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that
God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be
said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more
wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not
subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look
through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would
foretell what they would see next.

The policy of the Pope was that Galileo should not be disturbed so long
as he kept to his village home and taught merely the few scholars or
"servants," as they called themselves, who often came to him; but these
were to be taught mathematics, not astronomy. That he was even at the
last under suspicion is shown that concealed in the mattress of the bed
upon which he died were records of his latest discoveries concerning the
revolution of the planets. Legal opposition was made as to his right to
make a will, the claim being that he was a prisoner of the Inquisition
at his death. For the same reason his body was not allowed to be buried
in consecrated ground. The Pope overruled the objection and he was
buried in an obscure corner of the little cemetery of Saint Croce, the
grave unmarked.

So the last few years of Galileo's life were years of comparative peace
and quiet. He needed but little, and this little his few faithful,
loving friends supplied. His death came painlessly, and his last moments
were sustained by the faith that he would soon be free from the
trammels of the flesh--free to visit some of the worlds that his
telescope had brought so near to him.

Galileo was born the day that Michelangelo died; the year of his death
was the year that Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of the law of
gravitation, was born.




[Illustration: COPERNICUS]

COPERNICUS


     To know the mighty works of God; to comprehend His wisdom and
     majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful working
     of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode
     of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance can not be more
     grateful than knowledge.

     --_Copernicus_


COPERNICUS

When a prominent member of Congress, of slightly convivial turn,
went to sleep on the floor of the House of Representatives and suddenly
awakening, convulsed the assemblage by demanding in a loud voice, "Where
am I at?" he propounded an inquiry that is indisputably a classic.

With the very first glimmering of intelligence, and as far back as
history goes, man has always asked that question, also three others:

Where am I?

Who am I?

What am I here for?

Where am I going?

A question implies an answer and so, coeval with the questioner, we find
a class of Volunteers springing into being, who have taken upon
themselves the business of answering the interrogations.

And as partial payment for answering these questions, the man who
answered has exacted a living from the man who asked, also titles,
honors, gauds, jewels and obsequies.

Further than this, the Volunteer who answered has declared himself
exempt from all useful labor. This Volunteer is our theologian.

Walt Whitman has said:

  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
    and self-contained,
  I stand and look at them long and long.
  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
    owning things,
  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
    of years ago,
  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

But we should note this fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with
animals--he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit
knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet
to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has come from his
persistent questioning.

The book of Genesis is certainly right when it tells us that man's
troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge
is bitter, and man's digestive apparatus is ill-conditioned to digest
it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was
woman who gave the fruit to man--men learn nothing alone. In the Garden
of Eden, with everything supplied, man was an animal, but when he was
turned out and had to work, strive, struggle and suffer, he began to
grow.

The Volunteers of the Far East have told us that man's deliverance from
the evils of life must come through killing desire; we will reach
Nirvana--rest--through nothingness. But within a decade it has been
borne in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world that
deliverance from sorrow and discontent was to be had not through ceasing
to ask questions, but by asking one question more. The question is this,
"What can I do?"

When man went to work, action removed the doubt that theory could not
solve.

The rushing winds purify the air; only running water is pure; and the
holy man, if there be such, is the one who loses himself in persistent,
useful effort. By working for all, we secure the best results for self,
and when we truly work for self, we work for all.

In that thoughtful essay by Brooks Adams, "The Law of Civilization and
Decay," the author says, "Thought is one of the manifestations of human
energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand
conspicuous--Fear and Greed: Fear, which, by stimulating the
imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately
develops a priesthood."

The priestly class evolves naturally into being everywhere as man
awakens and asks questions. "Only the Unknown is terrible," says Victor
Hugo. We can cope with the known, and at the worst we can overcome the
unknown by accepting it. Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the
psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death
gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battleship, once said, "In modern
warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is
gone, and man is rendered by the Unknown into a quaking coward."

But when enveloped in the fog of ignorance every phenomenon of Nature
causes man to quake and tremble--he wants to know! Fear prompts him to
ask, and Greed--greed for power, place and pelf--answers.

To succeed beyond the average is to realize a weakness in humanity and
then bank on it. The priest who pacifies is as natural as the fear he
seeks to assuage--as natural as man himself.

So first, man is in bondage to his fear, and this bondage he exchanges
for bondage to a priest. First, he fears the unknown; second, he fears
the priest who has power with the unknown.

Soon the priest becomes a slave to the answers he has conjured forth. He
grows to believe what he at first pretended to know. The punishment of
every liar is that he eventually believes his lies. The mind of man
becomes tinted and subdued to what he works in, like the dyer's hand.

So we have the formula: Man in bondage to fear. Man in bondage to a
priest. The priest in bondage to a creed.

Then the priest and his institution become an integral part and parcel
of the State, mixed in all its affairs. The success of the State seems
to lie in holding belief intact and stilling all further questions of
the people, transferring all doubts to this Volunteer Class which
answers for a consideration.

Naturally, the man who does not accept the answers is regarded as an
enemy of the State--that is, the enemy of mankind.

To keep this questioner down has been the problem of every religion. And
the great problem of progress has been to smuggle the newly-discovered
truth past Cerberus, the priest, by preparing a sop that was to him
palatable.

From every branch of Science the priest has been routed, save in
Sociology alone. Here he has stubbornly made his last stand, and is
saving himself alive by slowly accepting the situation and transforming
himself into the Promoter of a Social Club.

       *       *       *       *       *

The attempt to ascertain the truths of physical science outside of
theology was, in the early ages, very seldom ventured. When men wanted
to know anything about anything, they asked the priest.

Questions that the priest could not answer he declared were forbidden of
man to know; and when men attempted to find out for themselves they were
looked upon as heretics.

The early church regarded the earth as a flat surface with four corners.
And in proof of their position they quoted Saint Paul, who wanted the
gospel carried to the ends of the earth.

In fact, the universe was a house. The upper story was Heaven, the lower
story was the Earth, and the cellar was Hell. God, the angels and the
"saved" lived in Heaven, man lived on Earth, and the devils and the
damned had Hell to themselves.

"And there shall be no night there," and this was proven by the stars,
which were regarded as peepholes through which mortals could catch
glimpses of the wondrous light of Heaven beyond. Hell was below, as was
clearly shown by volcanoes, when the fierce fires occasionally forced
themselves up through. Darkness to children is always terrible, and the
night is regarded by them as the time of evil.

Later, Churchmen came to believe that the stars were jewels hung in the
sky every night by angels whose business it was to look after them.

The word "firmament" means a solid dome or roof. This firmament, the
sky, was supposed to be the floor of Heaven. The firmament had four
corners and rested on the mountains, as the eye could plainly see. When
God's car was rolled across the floor we heard thunder, and his
movements were always accompanied by lightnings, winds, black clouds and
rain--all this so He could not be too plainly seen.

Heaven was only a little way off--a few miles at the most. So there were
attempts made at times by bad men to reach it. The Greeks had a story
about the Aloidæ who piled mountain upon mountain; the Bible story of
the Tower of Babel is the same, where the masons called, "More mort,"
and those below sent up bricks. There is also an ancient Mexican legend
of giants who built the Pyramid of Cholula, and they would have been
successful in their attempts if fire had not been thrown down upon them
from Heaven. In all "Holy Writ" we find accounts of "ascensions,"
"translations," "annunciations," and mortals caught up into the clouds.
Many people had actually seen angels ascending and descending.

"Messengers from on high" and God's secretaries were constantly coming
down on delicate errands. Everything that man did was noted and written
down. We were watched all the time by unseen beings. The Bible tells of
how the Earth was eventually to be destroyed, and then there would be
only Heaven and Hell. God, His Son and the angels were going to come
down, and for ages men watched the heavens to see them appear.

All sensitive children, born of orthodox Christian parents, who heard
the Bible read aloud, looked fearfully into the sky for "signs and
wonders." The Bible tells in several places of devils breaking out of
Hell and roaming over the earth. Dante fully believed in this
three-story-house idea, and pictures with awful exactness the details,
which he gained from the preaching of the priests. Dante was never
honored by having his books placed on the "Index." On the contrary, he
got his vogue largely through the recommendation of the priests. To them
he was a true scientist, for he corroborated their statements.

The Christian Fathers ridiculed the idea of the earth being round,
because, if this were so, how could the people on the other side see the
Son of Man when He came in the sky? Besides that, if the earth were
round and turned on its axis, we would all fall off into space.

The idea that there was an ocean above the earth, in the heavens, was
brought forward to show the goodness and wisdom of God. Without this
there would be no rain and hence no vegetation, and man would soon
perish. In Genesis we read that God said, "Let there be a firmament in
the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,"
And in Psalms, "Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens and ye waters that be
above the heavens." Then we hear, "The windows of Heaven were opened."
So this thought of the waters above the earth was fully proved, accepted
and fixed, and to pray for rain was quite a natural thing.

The English Prayer-Book contained such prayers up to within a very few
years ago, and in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three the Governor of Kansas
set apart a day upon which the people were to pray that God would open
the windows of Heaven and send them rain. They also prayed to be
delivered from grasshoppers, just as in Queen Elizabeth's time the
Prayer-Book had this, "From the Turk and the Comet, good Lord deliver
us."

In the Sixth Century, Cosmos, one of the Saints, wrote a complete
explanation of the phenomena of the heavens. To account for the movement
of the sun, he said God had His angels push it across the firmament and
put it behind a mountain each night, and the next morning it was brought
out on the other side. He met every objection by citations from Job,
Genesis, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the New Testament, and wound up with
an anathema upon any or all who doubted or questioned in this matter of
astronomy.

The whole Christian idea of the Universe was simple, plain and
plausible. The child-mind could easily accept it, and when backed up by
the Holy Book, written at God's dictation, word for word, infallible
and absolutely true in every part, one does not wonder that progress was
practically blocked for fourteen hundred years, but the real miracle is
that it was not blocked forever.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thousands of years before Christ, the Chinese had mapped the heavens and
knew the movements of the planets so well that they correctly prophesied
the positions of the various constellations many years in advance.
Twenty-five hundred years before our Christian era a Chinese Governor
put to death the astronomers Hi and Ho because they had failed to
foretell an eclipse, quite according to the excellent Celestial plan of
killing the doctor when the patient dies.

Sir William Hamilton points out the fact that the Chinese, five thousand
years ago, knew astronomy as well as we do, and that Christian astrology
grew out of Chinese astronomy, in an effort to foretell the fortunes of
men.

Fear wants to know the future, and astrology and priesthood are
synonymous terms, since the business of the priest has always been to
prophesy, a profession he has not yet discarded. Their prophecies are at
present innocuous and lightly heeded. They preach that perfect faith
will move a mountain, but energetic railroad-builders of today find it
quicker and cheaper to tunnel.

       *       *       *       *       *

A certain type of man accepts a certain theory.

The Christian view of creation was practically the conception of the
Greeks before Thales. This wise man, in the Sixth Century before Christ,
taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also
worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the
disappearance of the ship as it sailed away. He located the earth, moon
and sun so perfectly that he prophesied an eclipse, and when it took
place it so terrified the Medes and the Lydians, who were in battle with
each other, that they threw down their arms and made peace. Thales had
explained that Atlas carried the world on his shoulder, but he didn't
explain what Atlas stood upon.

Pythagoras, one of the pupils of Thales, following the idea still
further, showed that the moon derived its light from the sun; that the
earth was a globe and turned daily on its axis.

He held that the sun was the center of the universe and that the planets
revolved around it. Anaxagoras followed a few years later than
Pythagoras, and became convinced that the sun was merely a ball of fire
and therefore should not be worshiped; that it follows a natural law,
that nothing ever happens by chance, and that to pray for rain is
absurd.

For his honesty in expressing what he thought was truth, the priests of
Athens had Anaxagoras and his family exiled to perpetual banishment
from Athens and all of his books were burned.

Plato touched on Astronomy, for he touches on everything, and fully
believed that the earth was round.

His pupil, Aristotle, taught all that Anaxagoras taught, and if he also
had not been exiled, but had been free to study, investigate and express
himself, he would have come very close to the truth.

Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of
the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes
and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them.

Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the
royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest." For
over fourteen centuries it was the textbook for the best astronomers.

It taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the
sun and the planets revolve around it. There were many absurdities,
however, that had to be explained, and the priests practically rejected
the whole book as "pagan" and taught an astronomy of their own, founded
entirely upon the Bible. They wanted an explanation that would be
accepted by the common people.

This astronomy was not designed to be very scientific, exact or
truthful--all they asked was, "Is it plausible?" Expediency, to
theology, has always been much more important than truth.

"Besides," said Saint Basil, "what boots it concerning all this
conjecture about the stars, since the earth is soon to come to an end,
as is shown by our Holy Scriptures, and man's business is to prepare his
soul for eternity?"

This was the general attitude of the Church--exact truth was a matter of
indifference. And if Science tended to unseat men's faith in the Bible,
and in God's most holy religion, then so much the worse for Science.

It will thus plainly be seen why the Church felt compelled to fight
Science--the very life of the Church was at stake.

The Church was the vital thing--not truth. If truth could be taught
without unseating faith, why, all right, but anything that made men
doubt must be rooted out at any cost. And that is why priests have
opposed Science, not that they hate Science less, but that they love the
Church more.

From the time of Ptolemy to that of Copernicus--fourteen hundred
years--theology practically dictated the learning of the world. And to
Copernicus must be given the credit of having really awakened the
science of astronomy from her long and peaceful sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

The little land that we know as Poland has produced some of the finest
and most acute intellects the world has ever known.

Tragic and blood-stained is her history, and this tragedy, perhaps, has
been a prime factor in the evolution of her men of worth. Poland has
been stamped upon and pushed apart; and a persecuted people produce a
pride of race that has its outcrop in occasional genius.

Recently we heard of the great Paderewski playing before the Czar, and
His Majesty, in a speech meant to be very complimentary, congratulated
the company that so great a genius as he was a citizen of Russia.

"Your Majesty, I am not a Russian--I am a Pole!" was the proud reply.

The Czar replied, smiling, "There is no such country as Poland--now
there is only Russia!"

And Paderewski replied, "Pardon my hasty remark--you speak but truth."
And then he played Chopin's "Funeral March," a dirge not only to the
great men of Poland gone, but to Poland herself.

Nicholas Copernicus was born at the quaint old town of Thorn, in Poland,
February Nineteen, Fourteen Hundred Seventy-three. The family name was
Koppernigk, but Nicholas latinized it when he became of age, and
seemingly separated from his immediate kinsmen forever.

His father was a merchant, fairly prosperous, and only in the line of
money-making was he ambitious. In the Koppernigks ran a goodly strain of
Jewish blood, but a generation before, pressure and expediency seemed to
combine, so that the family, as we first see them, were Christians. No
soil can grow genius, no seed can produce it--it springs into being in
spite of all laws and rules and regulations. "No hovel is safe from it,"
says Whistler.

The portraits of Copernicus reveal a man of most marked personality:
proud, handsome, self-contained, intellectual. The head is massive, eyes
full, luminous, wide apart, his nose large and bold, chin strong, the
mouth alone revealing a trace of the feminine, as though the man were
the child of his mother. This mother had a brother who was a bishop, and
the mother's ambition for her boy was that he should eventually follow
in the footsteps of this illustrious brother who was known for a hundred
miles as a preacher of marked ability.

So we hear of the young man being sent to the University of Cracow, as
the preliminary to a great career.

The father bitterly opposed the idea of taking his son out of the
practical world of business, and this evidently led to the breach that
caused young Nicholas to discard the family name.

That Nicholas did not fully enter into his mother's plans is shown that
while at Cracow he devoted himself mostly to medicine. He was so
proficient in this that he secured a physician's degree; and having been
given leave to practise he revealed his humanity by declining to do so,
turning to mathematics with a fine frenzy.

This disposition to drop on a thing, turn loose on it, concentrate, and
reduce it to a chaos, is the true distinguishing mark of genius. The
difference in men does not lie in the size of their heads, nor in the
perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of
concentration--to throw the weight with the blow, live an eternity in an
hour--"This one thing I do!"

Copernicus at twenty-one was teaching mathematics at Cracow, and by his
extraordinary ability in this one direction had attracted the attention
of various learned men. In fact the authorities of the college had grown
a bit boastful of their star student, and when visiting dignitaries
arrived, young Copernicus was given chalk and blackboard and put through
his paces. Problems involving a dozen figures and many fractions were
worked out by him with a directness and precision that made him the
wonder of that particular part of the world.

The science of trigonometry was invented by Copernicus, and we see that
early in his twenties he was well on the heels of it, for he had then
arranged a quadrant to measure the height of standing trees, steeples,
buildings or mountains. For rest and recreation he painted pictures.

A college professor from Bologna traveling through Cracow met
Copernicus, and greatly impressed with his powers, invited him to
return with him to Bologna and there give a course of lectures on
mathematics.

Copernicus accepted, and at Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. This
meeting was the turning-point of his life. Copernicus was then
twenty-three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a
year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about
persons or things--only the great and noble themes should interest him
and occupy his attention.

With commonplace or ignorant people he held no converse. He had
remarkable beauty of person and great dignity, and his presence at
Bologna won immediate respect for him.

Men accept other men at the estimate they place upon themselves.

In listening to lectures by Novarra, he perceived at once how
mathematics could be made valuable in calculating the movement of stars.

Novarra taught the Ptolemaic theory of astronomy for the esoteric few.
The Church is made up of men, and while priests for the most part are
quite content to believe what the Church teaches, yet it has ever been
recognized that there was one doctrine for the Few, and another for the
Many--the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is an edged tool, and
only a very few are fit to handle it. The charge of heresy is only for
those who are so foolish as to give out these edged tools to the
people. You may talk about anything you want, provided you do not do it;
and you may do anything you want, provided you do not talk about it.

The proposition that the earth was flat, had four corners, and the stars
were jewels hung in the sky as "signs," and were moved about by angels,
was all right for the many, but now and then there were priests who were
not content with these child-stories--they wanted truth--and these
usually accepted the theories of Ptolemy.

Novarra believed that the earth was a globe; that this globe was the
center of the universe, and that around the earth the sun, moon and
certain stars revolved. The fixed stars he still regarded as being hung
against the firmament, and that this firmament was turned in some
mysterious way, en masse.

Copernicus listened silently, but his heart beat fast. He had found
something upon which he could exercise his mathematics. He and Novarra
sat up all night in the belfry of the cathedral and watched the stars.

They saw that they moved steadily, surely and without caprice. It was
all natural, and could be reduced, Copernicus thought, to a mathematical
system.

Astrology and astronomy were not then divorced. It was astrology that
gave us astronomy. The angel that watched over a star looked after all
persons who were born under that star's influence, or else appointed
some other angel for the purpose. Every person had a guardian angel to
protect him from the evil spirits that occasionally broke out of Hell
and came up to earth to tempt men.

Mathematics knows nothing of angels--it only knows what it can prove.
Copernicus believed that, if certain stars did move, they moved by some
unalterable law of their own. In riding on a boat he observed that the
shores seemed to be moving past, and he concluded that a part, at least,
of the seeming movements of planets might possibly be caused by the
moving of the earth.

In talking with astrologers he perceived that very seldom did they know
anything of mathematics. And this ignorance on their part caused him to
doubt them entirely.

His faith was in mathematics--the thing that could be proved--and he
came to the conclusion that astronomy and mathematics were one thing,
and astrology and child-stories another.

He remained at Bologna just long enough to turn the astrologers out of
the society of astronomers.

Novarra's lectures on astronomy were given in Latin, and in truth all
learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological
fairy-tales of the people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant
hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said
the things they thought would help carry conviction home and make
"believers."

From Bologna Copernicus then moved on to Padua, where he remained two
years, teaching and giving lectures. Here he devoted considerable time
to chemistry, and on leaving he was honored by being given a degree by
the University. Next we find him at Rome, a professor in mathematics and
also giving lectures on chemistry. His lectures were not for the
populace--they were for the learned few. But they attracted the
attention of the best, and were commented upon and quoted by the various
other teachers, preachers and lecturers. A daring thinker who expresses
himself without reservation states the things that various others know
and would like to state if they dared. It is often very convenient when
you want a thing said to enclose the matter in quotation-marks. It
relieves one from the responsibility of standing sponsor for it, if the
hypothesis does not prove popular.

Copernicus was only nineteen years old when Columbus discovered America,
but it seems he did not hear of Columbus until he reached Bologna in
Fourteen Hundred Ninety-five. At Rome he made various references to
Columbus in his lectures; dwelt upon the truth that the earth was a
globe; mentioned the obvious fact that in sailing westward Columbus did
not sail his ship over the edge of the earth into Hell, as had been
prophesied he would.

He also explained that the red sky at sunset was not caused by the
reflections from Hell, nor was the sun moved behind a mountain by giant
angels at night. Copernicus was a Catholic, as all teachers were, but he
had been deceived by the esoteric and the exoteric, and had really
thought that the priests and so-called educated men actually desired,
for themselves, to know the truth.

At Padua he had learned to read Greek, and had become more or less
familiar with Pythagoras, Hipparchus, Aristotle and Plato. He quoted
these authors and showed how in some ways they were beyond the present.
This was all done in the exuberance of youth, with never a doubt as to
the value and the beauty of the Church. But he was thinking more of
truth than of the Church, and when a cardinal from the Vatican came to
him, and in all kindness cautioned him, and in love explained it was all
right for a man to believe what he wished, but to teach others things
that were not authorized was a mistake.

Copernicus was abashed and depressed.

He saw then that his lectures had really been for himself--he was
endeavoring to make things plain to Copernicus, and the welfare of the
Church had been forgotten.

He ceased lecturing for a time, but private pupils came to him, and
among them astrologers in disguise, and these went away and told
broadcast that Copernicus was teaching that the movements of the stars
were not caused by angels, and that "God was being dethroned by a
tape-measure and a yardstick." Alchemy had a strong hold upon the
popular mind, and these alchemists and astrologers were fortune-tellers
and derived a goodly income from the people.

They had their stands in front of all churches and turned in a goodly
tithe "for the benefit of the poor."

When the astrologers attacked Copernicus he tried to explain that the
heavens were under the reign of natural law, and that so far as he knew
there was no direct relationship between the stars and the men upon
earth. The answer was, "You yourself foretell the eclipse, and assume to
know when a star will be in a certain place a hundred years in advance;
now, if you can prophesy about stars, why can't we foretell a man's
future?"

Copernicus proudly declined to answer such ignorance, but went on to say
that alchemy was a violence to chemistry as much as astrology was to
astronomy. In chemistry there were exact results that could be computed
by mathematics and foretold; it was likewise so in astronomy.

Copernicus was philosopher enough to know that astrology led to
astronomy, and alchemy led to chemistry, but he said all he wished to do
was to eliminate error and find the truth, and when we have ascertained
the laws of God in reference to these things, we should discard the use
of black cats, goggles, peaked hats, red fire and incantations--these
things were sacrilege. And the enemy declared that Copernicus was guilty
of heresy in saying they were guilty of sacrilege. Moreover, black cats
were not as bad as blackboards.

The Pope certainly had no idea of treating Copernicus harshly; in fact,
he greatly admired him--but peace was the thing desired. Copernicus was
creating a schism, and there was danger that the revenues would be
affected. The Pope sent for Copernicus, received him with great honor,
blessed him, and suggested that he return at once to his native town of
Thorn and there await good news that would come to him soon.

Copernicus was overwhelmed with gratitude--he was in difficulties.

Certain priests had publicly denounced him; others had urged him on to
unseemliness in debate; he had stated things he could not prove, even
though he knew they were true--but the Pope was his friend! He loved the
Church; he felt how necessary it was to the people, and at the last, the
desire of his heart was to bless and benefit the world.

He fell on his knees and attempted to kiss the Pope's foot, but the Holy
Father offered him his hand instead, smiled on him, stroked his head,
and an attendant was ordered to place about his neck a chain of gold
with a crucifix that would protect him from all harm. A purse was placed
in his hand, and he was sent upon his way relieved, happy--wondering,
wondering!

       *       *       *       *       *

When Copernicus reached his native town of Thorn, the local clergy
turned out in a procession to greet him, and a solemn service of
thanksgiving was held for his safe return home.

Copernicus was only twenty-seven years of age, and what he had done was
not quite clear to his uncle, the bishop, and the other dignitaries, but
word had come from the secretary of the Pope that he should be honored,
and it was all so done, in faith, love and enthusiasm.

Very shortly after this Copernicus was made Canon of the Cathedral at
Frauenburg. The town of Frauenburg has now only about twenty-five
hundred people, and it certainly was no larger then. The place is slow,
sleepy, and quite off the beaten track of travel.

When Canon Copernicus preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old
marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a
collaboration--let him wax eloquent about the precession of the
equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished--no one could
understand him! Rome is wise--the crystallized experience of centuries
is hers. Responsibility tames a man--marriage, political office,
churchly preferment--read history and note how these things have dulled
the bright blade of revolution and turned the radical into a
Presbyterian professor at Princeton, a staunch upholder of the
Established Order!

Plato said that Solar Energy found one of its forms of expression in
man. Some men are much more highly charged with it than others; your
genius is a man who does things. Do not think to dam up the red current
of his life--he may die.

Copernicus set to work practising medicine, and gave his services gratis
to the poor, who came for many miles to consult him.

He went from house to house and ordered his people to clean up their
back yards, to ventilate their houses, to bathe and be decent and
orderly. He devised a system of sewerage, and utilized the belfry of his
church as a water-tower so as to get a water pressure from the little
stream that ran near the town. The remains of this invention are to be
seen there in the church-steeple even unto this day.

King Sigismund of Poland had heard of the attacks made by Copernicus
upon the alchemists, and sent for him that he might profit by his
advice, for it seems that the King, too, had been having experience with
alchemists. In their seeking after a way to make gold out of the baser
metals they had actually succeeded. At least they said so, and had made
the King believe it.

They had shown the King how he could cheapen his coinage one-half, and
"it was just as good!" The King could not tell the difference when the
coins were new, but alas! when they went beyond the borders of Poland
they could only be passed at one-half their face-value; travelers
refused to accept them; and even the merchants at home were getting
afraid.

Copernicus analyzed some of this money made for the King by his
alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper and zinc. He
explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change
their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper--God had
made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some
men--a part of the time--but there was always a retribution. Debase your
currency, and soon it will cease to pass current. No law can long uphold
a fictitious value.

The King urged Copernicus to write a book on the subject of coinage.

The permission of the Pope was secured, and the book written. The work
is valuable yet, and reveals a deep insight into the heart of things.
The man knew political economy, and foretold that a people who debased
their currency debased themselves.

"Money is character," he said, "and if you pretend it is one thing, and
it turns out to be another, you lose your reputation and your own
self-respect. No government can afford to deceive the governed. If the
people lose confidence in their rulers, a new government will spring
into being, built upon the ruins of the old. Government and commerce are
built on confidence."

Then he went on to show that German gold was valuable everywhere,
because it was pure; but Polish gold and Russian gold were below par,
because the money had been tampered with, and as no secrets could be
kept long, the result was the matter exactly equalized itself, save that
Russians and Polanders had in a large degree lost their characters
through belief in miracles. Copernicus advocated a universal coinage, to
be adopted by all civilized nations, and the amount of alloy should be
known and plainly stated, and this alloy should simply be the
seigniorage, or what was taken out to cover the cost of mintage.

King Sigismund circulated this valuable book by Copernicus among all the
courts of Europe, and it need not be stated that the suggestions made by
Copernicus have been adopted by civilized nations everywhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

The humdrum duties of a country clergyman did not still the intense
longing of Copernicus to know and understand the truth. He visited the
sick, closed the eyes of the dying, kept his parish register, but his
heart was in mathematics, and so there is shown at Thorn an old church
register kept by Copernicus, where, in the back, are great rows of
figures put down by the Master as he worked at some astronomical
problem. In the upper floor of the barn, back of the old dilapidated
farmhouse where he lived for forty years, he cut holes in the roof, and
also apertures in the sides of the building, through which he watched
the movements of the stars. He lived in practical isolation and exile,
for the Church had forbidden him to speak in public except upon themes
that the Holy Fathers in their wisdom had authorized. None was to invite
him to speak, read his writings or hold converse with him, except on
strictly church matters.

Copernicus knew the situation--he was a watched man. For him there was
no preferment: he knew too much! As long as he kept near home and did
his priestly work, all was well; but a trace of ambition or heresy, and
he would be dealt with. The Universities and all prominent Churchmen
were secretly ordered to leave Copernicus and his vagaries severely
alone. But the stars were his companions--they came out for him nightly
and moved in majesty across the sky. "They do me great honor," he said;
"I am forbidden to converse with great men, but God has ordered for me a
procession." When the whole town slept, Copernicus watched the heavens,
and made minute records of his observations. He had brought with him
from Rome copies made by himself from the works of the prominent Greek
astronomers, and the "Almagest" of Ptolemy he knew by heart.

He digested all that had been written on the subject of astronomy;
slowly and patiently he tested every hypothesis with his rude and
improvised instruments. "Surely God will not damn me for wanting to know
the truth about His glorious works," he used to say.

Emerson once wrote this: "If the stars came out but once in a thousand
years, how men would adore!" But before he had written this, Copernicus
had said: "To look up at the sky, and behold the wondrous works of God,
must make a man bow his head and heart in silence. I have thought and
studied, and worked for years, and I know so little--all I can do is to
adore when I behold this unfailing regularity, this miraculous balance
and perfect adaptation. The majesty of it all humbles me to the dust."

It was ostracism and exile that gave Copernicus the leisure to pursue
his studies in quiet, undiverted, undisturbed. He was relieved from
financial pinch, having all he needed for his simple, homely wants. The
mental distance that separated him from his parishioners made him free,
and the order that he should not travel and that none should visit him
made him master of his time. There were no interruptions--"God has set
me apart," he wrote, "that I may study and make plain His works." But
still, that he could not make his discoveries known was a constant,
bitter disappointment to him.

In astronomy he found a means of using his mighty mathematical genius
for his own pleasure and amusement. The Pope had, in seeking to subdue
him, merely supplied the exact conditions he required to do his
work--yet neither knew it. So mighty is Destiny: we work for one thing
and fail to get it, but in our efforts we find something better.

The simple, hard-working gardeners with whom Copernicus lived, had a
reverent awe for the great man; they guessed his worth, but still had
suspicions of his sanity. His nightly vigils they took for a sort of
religious ecstasy, and a wholesome fear made them quite willing not to
do anything that might disturb him.

So passed the days away, and from a light-hearted, ambitious man,
Copernicus had grown old and bowed, and nearly blind from constant
watching of the stars and writing at night.

But his book, "The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies," was at last
complete. For forty years he had worked at it, and for twenty-seven
years, he himself says, not a day or a night had passed without his
having added something to it.

He felt that he had in this book told the truth. If men wanted to know
the facts about the heavens they would find them here. He had approached
the subject with no preconceived ideas; he had ever been willing to
renounce a theory when he found it wrong. He knew what all other great
astronomers had taught, and out of them all he had built a Science of
Astronomy that he knew would stand secure.

But what should he do with all this mass of truth he had discovered? It
was in his own brain, and it was in the three thousand pages of this
book, which had been rewritten five times. In a few years at most, his
brain would be stilled in death; and in five minutes, ignorance and
malice might reduce the book to ashes, and the forty years' labor of
Copernicus--working, dreaming, calculating, weeping, praying--would all
go for naught and be but a tale that is told. Others might have lived
such lives and known as much as he, and all was lost!

To send the book frankly to Rome and ask the Censor for the privilege to
publish it, was out of the question entirely--the request would be
refused, the manuscript destroyed, and his own life might be in danger.

To publish it at home without the consent of his Bishop would be equally
dangerous. There would be a bonfire of every copy in the public square;
for in this volume, all that the priests taught of astronomy had been
contradicted and refuted.

And then it occurred to him to send the manuscript to the free city of
Nuremberg, the home of science, art and free speech, where men could
print what they thought was truth--Nuremberg, the home of Albrecht
Durer. With the book he sent a bag of gold, his savings of a lifetime,
to pay the expense of printing the volume and putting it before the
world.

To better protect himself, Copernicus wrote a preface, dedicating the
book to the Pope Paul, thus throwing himself upon the mercy of His
Holiness. He would not put the work out anonymously, as his friends in
Nuremberg, for his own safety, had advised. And neither would he flee to
Nuremberg for protection; he would stay at home--he was too old to
travel now--besides, he had forgotten how to talk and act with men of
talent.

How would Rome receive the book? He could only guess--he could only
guess.

The months went by, and fear, anxiety and suspense had their sway. He
was stricken with fever. In his delirium he called aloud, "The
book--tell me--they surely have not burned it--you know I wrote no word
but truth--oh, how could they burn my book!"

But on May Twenty-third, Fifteen Hundred Forty-three, a messenger came
from Nuremberg.

He carried a copy of the printed book--he was admitted to the sick-room,
and placed in the hands of the stricken man the volume. A gleam of
sanity came to Copernicus. He smiled, and taking the book gazed upon it,
stroked its cover as though caressing it, opened it and turned the
leaves. Then closing the book and holding it to his heart, he closed his
eyes, and sank to sleep, to awake no more.

His body was buried with simple village honors, and laid to rest beneath
the floor of the Cathedral where he had so long ministered, side by side
with a long line of priests. On the little slab that marked his
resting-place no mention was made of the mighty work he had done for
truth. There were fears that when the character of his book was known,
the grave of Copernicus would not remain undisturbed, and so the
inscription on the headstone was simply this: "I ask not the grace
accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favor which
Thou didst show to the thief on the cross."




[Illustration: HUMBOLDT]

HUMBOLDT


     The actual miracle of the Universe is the invariableness of Law.
     Under like conditions a like result must follow, and upon this rock
     is the faith of the Scientists built.

     --_The Cosmos_


HUMBOLDT

The Baron and Baroness von Hollwede were not happily married.

The Baroness had intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of
all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the
Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draft
bitter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when
gout got to twinging him, he contented himself with cards and cronies.

And then Destiny, like a novelist who does not know what to do with a
character, sent him on an excursion across the River Styx.

This was a good move all round, and the only accommodating action in
which the Baron ever had a part. He left a large estate, not being able
to take it along.

There are two kinds of widows, the bereaved and the relieved. In India
no widow is allowed to remarry. The canons of the Episcopal Church
forbid any widow or widower to remarry whose former partner is living. A
member of the Catholic Church who makes a marital mistake is not allowed
to rectify it. Yet Nature, sometimes, as if to prove the foolishness of
fearsome little man, justifies that of which man hotly disapproves.

To be a widow of thirty-six, fair of face and comely in form, to own a
beautiful home and have an income greater than you can spend, and still
not enough to burden you--what nobler ambition!

The Baroness had a little encumbrance--a son aged ten. I would like to
tell of his career, but alas, of him history is silent, save that he was
heir to some of his father's proclivities, grew up, became an army
officer and passed into obscurity in middle life, dishonored and unsung.

Such a widow as the Baroness von Hollwede is not apt to mourn for long.
She was courted by many, but it was Major Humboldt who found favor in
her heart. I assume that all of my gentle readers have in them some of
the saltness of time, so that details may safely be omitted--let
imagination bridge the interesting gap.

The Major was a few years younger than the lady, but like the gallant
gentleman that he was, he swore i' faith before the notary that they
were of the same age, just as Robert Browning did when officially
interrogated as to the age of Elizabeth Barrett. Thomas Brackett Reed
avowed that no gentleman ever weighed over two hundred pounds, and I
also maintain no gentleman ever married a woman older than himself.

The marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most
happy mating that fully justified the venture. The Major had done his
work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an attache of the
King's Court--a man of means, of intellect, and of many strong and
beautiful virtues. After the marriage he became known as Baron von
Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not
be curious--his wife undoubtedly bestowed it on him, good and generous
woman that she was.

They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from
the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur
their secrets to the night breeze.

Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied
by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone
walls; and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far
indeed from the madding crowd.

Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness--two years
apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first
saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he
lived.

In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its
rise in storied Tegel. On May Eighteenth, in the year Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-eight. Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and
walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged
eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys
remembered the event and wrote of it in their journal, mentioning the
kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and
be great men.

Goethe was always patting boys on the head and saying graceful things,
and it is doubtful whether his prophecy was more than a mere
commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These
boys were William and Alexander von Humboldt.

History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the
intellectual height reached by Alexander and William von Humboldt. This
being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the
method adopted in the education of these boys--something that the
educated world for the most part has not done.

       *       *       *       *       *

This world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the
poles, has produced only five men who were educated. Of course all
education is comparative; but these five are so beyond the rest of
mankind that they form a class by themselves.

An educated man means a developed man--a man rounded on every side of
his nature. We are aware of no limit to which the mind of man may
evolve; other men may appear who will surpass the Immortal Five, but
this fact remains: none that we know have. Great men, so-called, are
usually specialists: clever actors, individuals with a knack, talented
comedians--who preach, carve, paint, orate, fight, manipulate, manage,
teach, write, perform, coerce, bribe, hypnotize, accomplish, and get
results. There are great financiers, sea-captains, mathematicians,
football players, engineers, bishops, wrestlers, runners, boxers, and
players on zithern-strings. But these are not necessarily very great
men, any more than poets, painters and pianists, with wonderful hirsute
effects and strange haberdashery are great men.

For it is intellect and emotion expanded in every direction that give
the true title to greatness. Judged in this way, how rare is the
educated man--five in six thousand years! And yet one of these five
educated men had a brother nearly as great as he.

Alexander von Humboldt was past fifty before the world of thinking men
realized that he had outstripped his brother William--and Alexander
would never admit he had.

These two men, handsome in face, form and feature: strong in body and
poised in mind, with souls athirst to realize and to know--happy men,
living long lives of useful effort--surely should be classed as educated
persons.

And in passing, let us note that all education is preparatory--it is
life that gives the finals, not the college. The education of the von
Humboldt boys was the Natural Method--the method advocated by
Rousseau--the education by play and work so combined that study never
becomes irksome nor work repulsive. Rousseau said, "Make a task
repugnant and the worker will forever quit it as soon as the pressure
that holds him to it is removed."

The parents of Alexander and William von Humboldt carefully studied the
new plan of education that was at that time being advocated by some of
the best professors at Berlin. "A child must have a teacher," said Jean
Jacques, "but a professional teacher is apt to become the slave of his
profession, and when this occurs he has separated himself from life, and
therefore to that degree is unfitted to teach."

A school should not be a preparation for life: a school should be life.
The Kindergarten Idea, among other things, suggests that a child should
never know he is in school.

The discipline is kept out of sight, and the youngster finds himself a
part of the busy life. He blends in with the others, and works, plays
and sings under the wise and loving care of his "other mother," the
teacher. He is living, not simply preparing to live. All life should be
joyous, spontaneous, natural. The Rousseau Idea, which was modified and
refined by Froebel, is the utilization of the propensity to play.

Major von Humboldt found a man who was saturated with the true Froebel
spirit, although this was before Froebel was born.

The man's name was Heinrich Campe. Heinrich was hired to superintend the
education of the Humboldt boys. That is to say, he was to become
comrade, friend, counselor, fellow-scholar, playmate and teacher.

Play needs direction as well as work. Campe played with the boys. They
lived with Nature--made lists of all the trees at Tegel, drew sketches
of the leaves and fruit, calculated the height of trees, measured them
at the base, and cut them down occasionally, first sitting in judgment
on the case, and deciding why a certain tree should be removed, thus
getting a lesson in scientific forestry.

They became acquainted with the bugs, beetles, birds and squirrels. They
cared for the horses, cattle and fowls, and best of all they learned to
wait on themselves.

Campe told them tales of history--of Achilles, Pericles and Cæsar. Then
they studied Greek, that they might read of Athens in the language of
the men who made Athens great. They translated "Robinson Crusoe" into
the German language, and Campe's translation of "Robinson Crusoe" is
today a German classic. It was all natural--interesting, easy. The day
was filled with work and play, and joyous tales of what had been said by
others in days agone.

"Teach only what you know, and never that which you merely believe,"
said Rousseau.

There is still a cry that religion should be taught in the public
schools. If we ask, "What religion?" the answer is, "Ours, of course!"

Religious dogma, being a matter of belief, was taught to the Humboldts
as a part of history.

So these boys very early became acquainted with the dogmas of
Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. They separated, compared and
analyzed, and saw for themselves that dogmatic religions were all much
alike. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying
the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion
fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps
to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner
Grocery Infidel. The C.G.I. is very apt to be converted at the first
revival, outrivaling all other "seekers," and when warm weather comes,
falling from grace and dropping easily into scofferdom.

The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel with God, and they
were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench.

Origin and destiny did not trouble them; predestination and
justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination
and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously.

By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to
distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side
with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe
was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only
classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know
differences--to distinguish between this and that. Every successful
farmer has traveled a long way into science, for science deals with the
maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be
scientific.

But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and
grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist
in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not
merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were
led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of
wanting to know the why and wherefore. It will be seen that the
education of the Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at
Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our
Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline--that it
should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and
exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim
earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine
and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it
play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these
latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all;
Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and
Froebel met the carpist and answered him reason for reason, just as
Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo told the reason the earth revolved. The
professional teacher who can do nothing but teach--the college professor
who is a college professor and nothing else--hates the Natural Method
man about as ardently as the person who wears a paste diamond hates the
lapidary.

       *       *       *       *       *

Heinrich Campe was the tutor of the Humboldts for two years, when he
entered the employ of the King as Commissioner of Education.

After this, however, he continued to spend one day a week at Tegel for
some time. He loved the boys as his own, and his hope for their future
never relaxed. Possibly his interest was not wholly disinterested--with
the help of these lads he was working out and proving his pedagogic
theories.

When Campe resigned his immediate tutorship he was allowed to select his
successor, and he chose a young man by the name of Christian Knuth.

The mother was a member of this little university of four persons;
Knuth, of course, was a member, for he always considered himself more of
a student than a teacher.

When Campe resigned in favor of Knuth his action was in degree prompted
by his love and consideration for the boys. Knuth was only a little past
twenty, and was able to enter into the out-of-door sports and work of
the youngsters better than the older man. Knuth was their hero--together
they rode horseback, climbed mountains, excavated tunnels, mined for
ore, built miniature houses. "Knuth made every good thing in Berlin
available to us," wrote William years afterward; "we visited stores,
factories, barracks and schools, and became familiar with a thousand
commonplace things never taught in schools and colleges."

When Alexander was twelve years old, the father died. This would have
been a severe blow to the boys were it not for Knuth, who seemed to
stand to them more as the real parent than did Major von Humboldt.

Knuth was a businessman of no mean ability. The Baroness now trusted him
with all her financial affairs. He called on the boys to help him in the
details of business, so the keeping of accounts and the economical
handling of money were lessons they learned early in life.

When Alexander was seventeen and William nineteen, the mother and Knuth
decided that the boys should have the advantages of university life.
Accordingly they were duly entered at the University of Frankfort as
"special students."

Knuth also entered as a student in the class with them. Special
students, let it be known, are usually those who have failed to pass the
required examinations. In this instance, Alexander and William were
beyond many of their classmates in some things, but in others they were
deficient. Especially had their education in the dead languages been
"neglected," so it is quite likely they could not have passed the
examinations had they attempted it.

It should also be explained that special students are not eligible to
diplomas or degrees.

But Campe and Knuth did not believe the nerve-racking plan of
examinations wise, any more than it is wisdom to pull up a plant and
examine the roots to see how it prospers. Neither did they prize a
college degree.

They knew full well that a college degree is no proof of excellence of
character; to them a degree was too cheap a thing to deviate in one's
orbit to secure. They were after bigger game.

At Frankfort, Knuth and his charges lived in the family of Professor
Loffler, "so as to rub off a little knowledge from this learned man."
They studied history, philosophy, law, political economy and natural
history. We would say their method was desultory, were it not for the
fact that they were always thorough in all that they undertook. They
were simply three boys together, intent on getting their money's worth.

William was a little better student than Alexander, and was the leader;
he was larger in stature and seemed to have more vitality.

Two years were spent at the University of Frankfort, and then our trio
moved on to the University of Gottingen, where there were distinguished
lecturers on Natural History and Archeology. Antiquity especially
interested the boys, and the evolution and history of races were
followed with animation.

William took especially to philosophy as expressed in the writings of
Kant, while Alexander developed a love for botany and what he called
"the science of out-of-doors."

Two years at Gottingen, following the bent of their minds and listening
only to those lectures they liked, and they moved on to Jena.

Here they were in the Goethe country. Soon there were overtures from
Berlin that they enter the service of the Government. These overtures
were set in motion by Campe, who, however, kept out of sight in the
matter, and when accused, stoutly declared that it was every man's duty
to help himself, and that he personally had never helped any one get a
position and never would.

William was twenty-three and Alexander twenty-one. William was gracious
and graceful in manner and made himself at home in the best society;
Alexander was studious, reserved and inclined to be shy.

An invitation came that they should visit Weimar and spend some weeks in
that little world of art and letters created by Goethe and Schiller. To
William this was very tempting; but Alexander saw at Weimar scant
opportunity to study botany and geology.

Besides that, he felt that sooner or later he would drift into the
employ of the Government, following in his father's footsteps. His
ambition was practical mining, with a taste for finance.

The brothers kissed each other good-by, and one went to Weimar to assist
Schiller in editing a magazine that did not pay expenses, to bask in the
sunshine of the great Goethe, and incidentally to secure a wife.

The other started on a geological excursion, and this excursion was to
continue through life, and make of the man the greatest naturalist that
the world had seen since Aristotle lived, two thousand years before.

       *       *       *       *       *

Humboldt's first book was on the geological formation of the Rhine,
published when he was twenty-six years old. The work was so complete and
painstaking that it led to his being appointed to the position of
"Assessor of Mines" at Berlin. This was the same office that Swedenborg
once held in Scandinavia.

For the benefit of our social-science friends, it is rather interesting
to note that at this time in Europe nearly all mines belonged to the
Government.

An individual might own the surface, and up to the sky, but his claim
did not go to the center of the earth. Iron, coal, copper, silver and
gold were largely mined, and the Government operated the mines direct,
or else leased them on a percentage.

I am told that in America all mining is done by individuals or private
companies, and that four-fifths of all mining companies have no mines at
all--merely samples of ores, blueprints, photographs and prospects. The
genus promoter is a very modern production, and is a creation Humboldt
never knew; the "salting" of mines was out of his province, and mining
operations carried on exclusively in sky-scrapers was a combination he
never guessed.

Whether society will ever take a turn backward, and the whole people own
and control the treasures deposited by Nature in the earth, is a
question I will leave to my Marxian colleagues to determine.

As a mine-manager Humboldt was hardly a success. He knew the value of
ores, utilized various by-products that had formerly been thrown away,
made plans for the betterment of his workers, and once sent a protest to
the King against allowing women and children to be employed underground.

But the price per ton of his product was out of proportion to the
expenses. While other men mined the ore he wrote a book on "Subterranean
Vegetation." The details of business were not to his liking. His own
private financial affairs were now turned over to Knuth, his modest
fortune resolved into cash and invested in bonds that brought a low rate
of interest. Freedom was his passion--to come and go at will was his
desire. The thirst for travel was upon him--travel, not for adventure,
but for knowledge.

He resigned his office and tramped with knapsack on back across the
Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist-investigator.
Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right.

These sciences really form one--geognosy, or the science of the
formation of the earth. The plants dissolve and disintegrate the rocks;
the animal feeds upon the plants; and animal life makes new forms of
vegetation possible. So the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms
evolve together, constantly tending toward a greater degree of
refinement and complexity.

The very highest form of animal life is man; and the highest type of
man is evolved where there is a proper balance between the animal and
the vegetable kingdoms.

Humboldt discovered very early in his career that the finest flowers
grow where there are the finest birds, and man separated from birds,
beasts and flowers could not possibly survive.

Just about this time, Humboldt, taking the cue from Goethe, said: "Man
is a product of soil and climate, and is brother to the rocks, trees and
animals. He is dependent on these, and all things seem to point to the
truth that he has evolved from them. The accounts of special creation
are interesting as archeology, but biology is distinctly the business of
modern scientists. The scientist tells what he knows, and the theologist
what he believes." And again we find Humboldt writing from Switzerland
in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, making observations that have been
recently unconsciously paraphrased by the United States Secretary of
Agriculture, who said in a printed report: "Western farmers who raise
and sell hogs and cattle, feeding them grain instead of selling it, are
sure to acquire a competence. The farmers who sell grain are the ones
who do not pay off their mortgages."

Says Humboldt:

"Here on the sides of these towering and forbidding mountains we find
the most fertile and beautiful miniature farms, nestling in little
valleys or on plateaus.

"Indeed, I heard today of a man falling out of his farm and being
seriously injured. He ventured too near the edge.

"These Swiss gardens with their prosperous and intelligent owners are
only possible through the fact that the owners keep all the cows and
poultry that can comfortably exist on the acres. The peasants sell
butter, cheese and eggs, instead of grain and vegetables exclusively.

"They give back to the earth all that they take from it, so in the
course of a hundred years a fine soil evolves that supports valuable
animals, including valuable men; choice fruit, flowers and birds appear,
and we have what we are pleased to call Christian civilization. It is
not for me to quibble about terms, but civilization is not necessarily
Christian, since it is more a matter of economics and natural science
than religion."

Where the climate is fairly propitious, but not so much so but that it
compels watchfulness, economy and effort, man will work, and to aid him
in his work he utilizes domestic animals. And the very act of
domesticating the animal domesticates the man. As man improves the
animal, he improves himself. One reason why the American Indian did not
progress was because he had neither horses, camels, oxen, swine nor
poultry. He had his dog, and the dog is a wolf, and always remains one,
in that his intent is on prey. This fitted the mood of the Indian, and
he continued to live his predaceous career without a particle of
evolution. To stand still is to retreat, and there is evidence that long
before the year Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a North American
Indian that was a better Indian than the Indians who watched the
approach of Columbus and exclaimed, "Alas! we are discovered!"

In crossing the Alps, Humboldt was impressed with the truth that man was
a necessary factor in working out "creation," just as much as the
earthworm. When men stir the soil so as to make it produce grain that
the family may be fed, and utilize animals in this work, civilization is
surely at hand.

Nations with a controlling desire to absorb, annex and exploit are still
to that degree savages. Creation is still going on, and this earth is
becoming better and more beautiful as men work in line with reason and
allow science to become the handmaid of instinct.

Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Darwin, Spencer and
Tyndall--all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine
in which they constantly delved.

Humboldt in boyhood formed the habit of close and accurate observation,
and he traveled that he might gratify this controlling impulse of his
life--the habit of seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was
superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change
his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination
to see the thing first with his inward eye; he had the strength to
endure physical discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was
free to follow his bent.

These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers--the
pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco
Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous
things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and
anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The
temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been
strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus
and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited
exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their
gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them.

The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts
of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was
accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held
themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as
renegades or spies.

Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains,
visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses
into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley
before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a
fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the
harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette "Pizarro," bound for
the Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain had discovered America
in the gross two hundred years before, but what this country really
contained in way of possibilities, Spain had most certainly never
discovered.

Humboldt's mind had conceived the idea of a Scientific Survey, and in
this he was the maker of an epoch. In this undertaking he secured the
assistance of the Prime Minister, who secretly issued passports and
letters of recommendation to Humboldt, first cautioning him that if the
Court of Madrid should know anything about this proposed voyage of
discovery it could never be made, so jealous and ignorant were the
officials.

Only one thing did Spain have in abundance, and that was religion.

At that time the Spanish Colonies included Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
California, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, most of the West Indies, and
most of South America, not to mention the Philippines. These colonies
covered a territory stretching over five thousand miles from North to
South. Twice a year Spain sent out her trading-ships, convoyed by armed
cruisers. Trade then was monopoly and extortion. The goods sent out were
as cheap and tawdry as could be palmed off; all that were brought back
were bartered for at the lowest possible prices.

Cheating in count, weight and quality was then considered perfectly
proper, and as the Government officials at home got a goodly grab into
all transactions in way of perquisites, all went swimmingly--or fairly
so.

For a Spaniard to trade with any other nation was treason, and if
caught, his property was confiscated and probably his head forfeited.

No foreigners were allowed in the colonies, and exclusion was the rule.
To hold her dependencies Spain thought she must keep them under close
subjection; and she seemed beautifully innocent of the fact that she was
the dependent, not they. She did not believe in Free Trade.

The Government was absolutely under military rule. Of the botany,
zoology, geology, not to mention the topography, of her American
possessions, the officials of Spain knew nothing save from the tales of
sailors.

Such were the Spanish conditions when Humboldt got himself smuggled on
board the "Pizarro," and sailed away, June Fourth, Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-nine. With Humboldt was one companion, Bonpland, a Swiss by
birth, and a rare soul.

Humboldt was a naturalist and a philosopher; by nature he was a
traveler. But he lacked that intrepid quality possessed by, say, Lewis
and Clarke.

He had too much brain--too fine a nerve-quality to face the forest
alone. Bonpland made good all that he lacked. He used to call Bonpland
his "Treasure." And surely such a friend is a treasure, indeed.
Bonpland was a linguist, as most of the Swiss are. He was a
mountain-climber, and had been a soldier and a sailor, and he knew
enough of literature and science, so he was an interesting companion.

He was small in stature, lithe, immensely strong, absolutely fearless,
and had left behind him neither family nor friends to mourn his loss. To
Humboldt he was guide, teacher, protector and friend. Bonpland was the
soul of unselfishness.

Perhaps a certain quality of man attracts a certain quality of friend--I
really am not sure. But this I know, that while Alexander von Humboldt
had few personal friends, he always had just those which his nature
required--his friends were hands, feet, eyes and ears for him, to quote
his own words. This voyage on the "Pizarro" occupied five years. The
travelers visited Teneriffe, Cuba, Mexico, and skirted the coast of
South America, making many little journeys inland.

They climbed mountains that had never been scaled before; they ascended
rivers where no white man had ever been, and pushed their way through
jungle and forest to visit savage tribes who fled before them in terror
thinking they were gods. On the return trip they visited the United
States; spent some weeks in Washington, where they were the guests of
the President, Thomas Jefferson. A firm friendship sprang up between
Humboldt and Jefferson: they were both freethinkers, and when Humboldt
recorded in his journal that Jefferson was by far the greatest man
living in America, he not only recorded his personal conviction, but he
spoke the truth.

And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt
had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the
greatest man he ever saw.

Most of the vast number of rare specimens and natural-history
curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a
homeward-bound ship that sailed from South America. This ship was lost
and all the precious and priceless cargo went for naught. Had Humboldt
and his companion sailed on this ship, as they had at first intended,
instead of returning by way of the United States, the world would not
have known the name of Alexander von Humboldt.

But Fate for once was kind--the world had great need of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Humboldt landed at Bordeaux in August, in Eighteen Hundred Four,
after his five-year journey, he immediately set out to visit his
brother, who was then German Ambassador at Rome. We can imagine that it
was a most joyous meeting.

Of it William said: "I could not recognize him for my tears--but beside
this he seemed to have grown in stature and was as brown as a Malay. Was
he really my brother? Ah, the hand was the hand of Esau, but when he
spoke, it was the same kind, gentle, loving voice--the voice of my
brother."

A few weeks at Rome and Alexander grew restless for work. He had made
great plans about publishing the record of his travels. This work was to
outstrip anything in bookmaking the world had ever seen, dealing with
similar subjects. The writing was done on shipboard, by campfires, and
in forest and jungle, but now it had all to be gone over and revised and
much of it translated into French, for the original notes were sometimes
in English and sometimes in German. Only in Paris could the work of
bookmaking be done that would fill Humboldt's ideals. In Paris were
printers, engravers, artists, binders--Paris was then the artistic
center of the world, as it is today.

The results of this first great scientific voyage of discovery were
written out in a work of seventeen volumes.

It was entitled, "The Travels of Humboldt and Bonpland in the Interior
of America." Humboldt wrote the book, but wanted his friend to have half
the credit. This superb set of books, containing many engravings, was
issued under Humboldt's supervision and almost entirely at his own
expense. It was divided into five general parts: Zoology and Comparative
Anatomy; Geography and the Distribution of Plants; Political Essays and
Description of Peoples and Institutions in the Kingdom of New Spain;
Astronomy and Magnetism; Equinoctial Vegetation. It took two years to
issue the first volume, but the others then came along more rapidly, yet
it was ten years before the last book of the set was published. The
total expense of issuing this set of books was more than a million
francs, or, to be exact, two hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.

The cost of a set of these books to subscribers was two thousand five
hundred fifty dollars, although there were a few sets containing
hand-colored plates and original drawings that were valued at twenty
thousand dollars. One such set can now be seen at the British Museum. In
all, only three hundred sets of these books were issued.

One set at least came to North America, for it was presented to Thomas
Jefferson, and, if I am not mistaken, is now in the Congressional
Library at Washington.

This American Expedition forever fixed Alexander von Humboldt's place in
history, but after it was completed and the record written out, he had
still more than half a century to live.

       *       *       *       *       *

At a time when few men could afford the luxury, Alexander von Humboldt
was an atheist. Fortunately he had sufficient fortune to place him
beyond reach of the bread-and-butter problem, and all of his books were
written in the language of the esoteric. He did not serve as an
iconoclast for the common people--his name was never on the tongue of
rumor--very few, indeed, knew of his existence. His books were issued in
deluxe, limited editions, and were for public libraries, the shelves of
nobility or rich collectors.

Humboldt was judicial in all of his statements, approaching every
question as if nothing were known about it. He built strong, and was
preparing the way, such as throwing up ramparts and storing ammunition
for the first decisive battle that was to take place between Theology
and Science.

In his day Theology was supreme, the practical dictator of human
liberties. But a World's Congress of Freethinkers has recently been held
in Rome.

There were present more than three thousand delegates, representing
every civilized country on the globe. The deliberations of the Congress
were held in a hall supplied by the Italian Government, and all
courtesies and privileges were tendered the delegates. The only protest
came from the Pope, who turned Protestant and in all the Catholic
churches in Rome ordered special services, to partially mitigate the
blot upon the fair record of the "Holy City." Forty years ago armed men
would have routed this Congress by force, and a hundred years ago the
bare thought of such a meeting would have placed a person who might have
suggested it in imminent peril.

Humboldt prophesied that the world would not forever be ruled by
religious superstition--that science must surely win. But he did not
expect that the change would come as quickly as it has; neither did he
anticipate the fact that the orthodox religion would admit all the facts
of science and still flourish. The number of Church communicants now is
larger than it was in the time of Humboldt. The Church is a
department-store that puts in the particular goods that the people ask
for.

Freethinkers do not leave the Church; the Church is built on a Goodyear
patent, and its lines expand when Freethinkers get numerous, so as to
include them.

The Church would rather countenance vice, as it has in the past, than
disband. In New York City we now have the spectacle of the Church
operating a saloon and selling strong drink. In all country towns,
religion, failing in being attractive, has, to keep churches alive,
resorted to raffles, lotteries, concerts, chicken-pie socials, and
lectures and exhortations by strange men in curious and unique garb, and
singers of reputation.

The Church, being a part of society, evolves as society evolves.
Christianity is a totally different thing now from what it was in
Humboldt's time; it was a different thing in Humboldt's time from what
it was a hundred years before.

Behold the spectacle of a thousand highly educated and gentle men, from
all over the world, decorating with garlands the statue of Bruno in
Rome, on the site where Churchmen piled high the fagots and burned his
living body! I foretell that when the next World's Congress of
Freethinkers occurs in Rome, the Pope will welcome the delegates, and
their deliberations will occur by invitation in the wide basilica of
Saint Peter's. The world moves, and the Pope and all the rest of us move
with it.

When a meeting was recently called in Jersey City to welcome Turner, the
so-called anarchist, the Mayor forbade the meeting and then placed a
cordon of policemen around the intended meeting-place. But, lo, in their
extremity the "anarchists" were invited by a clergyman to come and use
his church and he led the way to the sacred edifice, warning the police
to neither follow nor enter. As we become better we meet better
preachers.

Humboldt could see no rift through the clouds outside of the death of
the Church and the disbanding of her so-called sacred institutions. We
now perceive that very rarely are religious opinions consciously
abandoned; they change, are modified and later evolve into something
else. Churches are now largely social clubs. In America this is true
both of Catholic and of Protestant. Most all denominations are
interested in social betterment, because the trend of human thought is
in that direction.

The Church is being swept along upon the tide of time. In a few
instances churches have already evolved practical industrial
betterments, which are conducted directly under the supervision of the
church and in its edifice. There are hundreds of Kindergartens now being
carried on in church buildings that a few years ago were idle and vacant
all the week. Others have sewing-circles and boys' clubs, and these have
metamorphosed in some instances into Manual-Training Schools where girls
are taught Domestic Science and boys are given instruction in the
Handicrafts. I know a church that derives its support from the sale of
useful things that are made by its members and workers under the
supervision of its pastor, who is a master in handicraft. So this pretty
nearly points the ideal--a church that has evolved into an ethical and
industrial college, where the pastor is not paid for preaching, but for
doing.

Charles Bradlaugh once said:

"A paid priesthood blocks evolution. These men are really educated to
uphold and defend the institution. They can do nothing else. Most of
them have families dependent upon them--do you wonder that it is a fight
to the death? It is not truth that the clergy struggles for--they may
think it is--but the grim fact remains, it is a fight for material
existence."

We all confuse our interests with the eternal verities--the thing that
pays us we consider righteous, or at least justifiable. This is the most
natural thing in the world. An artist who painted very bad pictures once
took one of his canvases to Whistler for criticism.

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and made a grimace that spoke volumes. "But
a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity.

"I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply.

Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them
for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle
for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the
obsolete and the outworn. Disraeli once in an incautious moment
exclaimed: "If we do away with the Established Church, what is to become
of the fourteen million prepared and pickled sermons? Think for a moment
of the infinite labor of writing new sermons, all based upon a different
point of view--let us then be reasonable and not subject a profession
that is overworked to the humiliation of destroying the bulk of its
assets."

Science deals directly with the maintenance of human life and the
bettering of every condition of existence through a wider, wiser and
saner use of the world. Civilization is the working out and
comprehending and proving how to live in the best way. Theology
prepares men to die; science fits them to live.

Science deals with your welfare in this world; theology in another.
Theology has not yet proved that there is another world--its claims are
not even based upon hearsay. It is a matter of belief and assumption.

Science, too, assumes, and its assumption is this: The best preparation
for a life to come is to live here and now as if there were no life to
come.

Your belief will not fix your place in another world--what you are, may.
The individual who gets most out of this life is fitting himself to get
most out of another if there is one.

And this brings us up to that paragraph in the "Cosmos" where Humboldt
says: "I perceive a period when the true priesthood will not be paid to
defend a fixed system of so-called crystallized truth. But I believe the
time will come when that man will be most revered who bestows most
benefits here and now. The clergy of Christendom have stood as leaders
of thought, but to hold this proud position they must abandon the
intangible and devote themselves to this world and the people who are
alive."

       *       *       *       *       *

Most of Humboldt's time during his middle life was spent at Paris, where
he was busily engaged in the herculean task of issuing his splendid
books. He varied his work, however, so that several hours daily were
devoted to study and scientific research; and from time to time he made
journeys over Europe and Asia.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-seven a personal request came from the King
of Prussia that Humboldt should thereafter make Berlin his home. He was
too big a man for Germany to lose.

He acceded to the King's request, moved to Berlin and was spoken of as
"The First Citizen," although he would not consent to hold office, nor
would he accept a title.

In vexed questions of diplomacy he was often consulted by the King and
his Cabinet, and in a great many ways he furthered the interests of
education and civilization by his judicial and timely advice.

He was always a student, always an investigator, always a tireless
worker. He lived simply and quietly--keeping out of society and away
from crowds, except on the rare occasions when necessity seemed to
demand it.

The quality of the man was well mirrored in those magnificent books--all
that he did was on the scale of grandeur.

His books were too high in price for the average reader, but on request
of the King he consented to give a course of five, free, popular
lectures for the people.

No one foresaw the result of these addresses. The course was so
successful that it extended itself into sixty-one lectures, and covered
a period of more than ten years' time. No admittance was charged, free
tickets being given out to applicants. Very soon after the first
lecture, a traffic sprang up in these free tickets, carried on by our
Semitic friends, and the tickets soared to as high as three dollars
each. Then the strong hand of the Government stepped in: the tickets
were canceled, and the public was admitted to the lectures without
ceremony. Boxes, however, were set apart for royalty and foreign
visitors, some of whom came from England, Belgium, Switzerland and
France. The size of these audiences was limited simply by the capacity
of the auditorium, the attendance at first being about a thousand;
later, a larger hall was secured and the attendance ran as high as four
thousand persons at each address.

The subjects were as follows: three lectures on the History of Science;
two on reasons why we should study Science; four on the Crust of the
Earth, and the nature of Volcanoes and Earthquakes; two on the form of
Earth's Surface and the elevation of the Continents; five on Physical
Geography; five on the nature of Heat and Magnetism; sixteen on
Astronomy; two on Mountains and how they are formed; three on the Nature
of the Sea; three on the Distribution of Matter; ten on the Atmosphere
as an Elastic Fluid; three on the Geography of Animals; three on Races
of Men.

Every good thing begins as something else, and what was intended for the
common people became scientific lectures for educated people. "The man
who was most benefited by these lectures was myself," said Humboldt.

Men grow by doing things. Lectures are for the lecturer.

Humboldt found out more things in giving these lectures than he knew
before--he discovered himself. And long before they were completed he
knew that his best work was embodied right here--in doing for others he
had done for himself.

In attempting to reveal the Universe or "Cosmos," he revealed most of
his own comprehensive intelligence. That many of his conclusions have
since been abandoned by the scientific world does not prove such ideas
valueless--they helped and are helping men to find the truth.

These sixty-one "popular" and free lectures make up that stupendous work
now known to us as "Humboldt's Cosmos."

       *       *       *       *       *

Says Robert Ingersoll in his tribute to Alexander von Humboldt:

"His life was pure, his aims were lofty, his learning varied and
profound, and his achievements vast.

"We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has
contributed as much as any man, living or dead, to the real prosperity
of the world. We honor him because he has honored us--because he has
labored for others--because he was the most learned man of the most
learned nation of his time--because he left a legacy of glory to every
human being. For these reasons he is honored throughout the world.

"Millions are doing homage to his genius at this moment, and millions
are pronouncing his name with reverence and recounting what he
accomplished.

"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains,
volcanoes--with towering palms--the snow-lipped craters of the
Andes--the wide deserts--with primeval forests and European
capitals--with wilderness and universities--with savages and
savants--with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes--with peaks, pampas,
steppes, cliffs and crags--with the progress of the world--with every
science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of
space. Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he
wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions
of theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the
astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the
Nineteenth Century.

"Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth: he
investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the
dross in the crucible of his brain. He was never found on his knees
before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column
of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the
age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the
insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings
for his servants, he laid his weary head upon her bosom--upon the bosom
of the Universal Mother--and with her loving arms about him, sank into
that slumber which we call Death.

"History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals.

"The world is his monument; upon the eternal granite of her hills he
inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting stone, his genius wrote
this, the sublimest of truths: The universe is governed by law."




[Illustration: WILLIAM HERSCHEL]

WILLIAM HERSCHEL


     The great number of alterations of stars that we are certain have
     happened within the last two centuries, and the much greater number
     that we have reason to suspect to have taken place, are curious
     features in the history of the heavens, as curious as the slow
     wearing away of the landmarks of our earth on mountains, on river
     banks, on ocean shores. If we consider how little attention has
     formerly been paid this subject, and that most of the observations
     we have are of a very late date, it would perhaps not appear
     extraordinary were we to admit the number of alterations that have
     probably happened to different stars, within our own time, to be a
     hundred.

     --_William Herschel_


WILLIAM HERSCHEL

William Herschell, born Seventeen Hundred Thirty-eight, in the city
of Hanover, was the fourth child in a family of ten. Big families, I am
told, usually live in little houses, while little families live in big
houses. The Herschels were no exception to the rule.

Isaac Herschel, known to the world as being the father of his son, was a
poor man, depending for support upon his meager salary as bandmaster to
a regiment of the Hanoverian Guards.

At the garrison school, taught by a retired captain, William was the
star scholar. In mathematics he propounded problems that made the worthy
captain pooh-pooh and change the subject.

At fourteen, he was playing a hautboy in his father's band and
practising on the violin at spare times.

For music he had a veritable passion, and to have a passion for a thing
means that you excel in it--excellence is a matter of intensity. One of
the players in the band was a Frenchman, and William made an arrangement
to give the "parlez vous" lessons on the violin as payment for lessons
in French.

This whole brood of Herschel children was musical, and very early in
life the young Herschels became self-supporting as singers and players.
"It is the only thing they can do," their father said. But his loins
were wiser than his head.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five William accompanied his father's band to
England, where they went to take part in a demonstration in honor of a
Hanoverian, one George the Third, who later was to play a necessary part
in a symphony that was to edify the American Colonies. America owes much
to George the Third.

Young Herschel had already learned to speak English, just as he had
learned French. In England he spent all the money he had for three
volumes of "Locke on the Human Understanding."

These books were to remain his lifelong possession and to be passed on,
well-thumbed, to his son more than half a century later.

At the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years' War, William
Herschel was nineteen. His regiment had been ordered to march in a week.
Here was a pivotal point--should he go and fight for the glory of
Prussia?

Not he--by the connivance of his mother and sisters, he was secreted on
a trading-sloop bound for England. This is what is called desertion; and
just how the young man evaded the penalties, since the King of England
was also Elector of Hanover, I do not know, but the House of Hanover
made no effort toward punishment of the culprit, even when the facts
were known.

Musicians of quality were, perhaps, needed in England; and as
sheep-stealing is looked upon lightly by priests who love mutton, so do
kings forgive infractions if they need the man.

When William Herschel landed at Dover he had in his pocket a single
crownpiece, and his luggage consisted of the clothes he wore, and a
violin. The violin secured him board and lodgings along the road as he
walked to London, just as Oliver Goldsmith paid his way with a similar
legal tender.

In London, Herschel's musical skill quickly got him an engagement at one
of the theaters. In a few months we hear of his playing solos at
Brabandt's aristocratic concerts. Little journeys into "the provinces"
were taken by the orchestra to which Herschel belonged. Among other
places visited was Bath, and here the troupe was booked for a two-weeks'
engagement. At this time Bath was run wide open.

Bath was a rendezvous for the gouty dignitaries of Church and State who
had grown swag through sloth and much travel by the gorge route. There
were ministers of state, soldiers, admirals-of-the-sea, promoters,
preachers, philosophers, players, poets, polite gamblers and buffoons.

They idled, fiddled, danced, gabbled, gadded and gossiped. The "School
for Scandal" was written on the spot, with models drawn from life. It
wasn't a play--it was a cross-section of Bath Society.

Bath was a clearing-house for the wit, learning and folly of all
England--the combined Hot Springs, Coney Island, Saratoga and Old Point
Comfort of the Kingdom. The most costly church of its size in America is
at Saint Augustine, Florida. The repentant ones patronize it in Lent;
the rest of the year it is closed.

At Bath there was the Octagon Chapel, which had the best pipe-organ in
England. Herschel played the organ: where he learned how nobody seemed
to know--he himself did not know. But playing musical instruments is a
little like learning a new language.

A man who speaks three languages can take a day off and learn a fourth
almost any time. Somebody has said that there is really only one
language, and most of us have only a dialect. Acquire three languages
and you perceive that there is a universal basis upon which the various
tongues are built.

Herschel could play the hautboy, the violin and the harpsichord. The
organ came easy. When he played the organ in the Chapel at Bath, fair
ladies forgot the Pump-Room, and the gallants followed them--naturally.
Herschel became the rage. He was a handsome fellow, with a pride so
supreme that it completed the circle, and people called it humility. He
talked but little, and made himself scarce--a point every genius should
ponder well.

The disarming of the populace--confiscating canes, umbrellas and
parasols--before allowing people to enter an art-gallery is necessary;
although it is a peculiar comment on humanity to think people have a
tendency to smite, punch, prod and poke beautiful things. The same
propensity manifests itself in wishing to fumble a genius. Get your
coarse hands on Richard Mansfield if you can! Corral Maude
Adams--hardly. To do big things, to create, breaks down tissue awfully,
and to mix it with society and still do big things for society is
impossible.

At Bath, Herschel was never seen in the Pump-Room, nor on the North
Parade. People who saw him paid for the privilege. "In England about
this time look out for a shower of genius," the almanackers might have
said.

To Bath came two Irishmen, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Burke rented rooms of Doctor Nugent, and married the doctor's daughter,
and never regretted it. Sheridan also married a Bath girl, but added the
right touch of romance by keeping the matter secret, with the intent
that if either party wished to back out of the agreement it would be
allowed. This was quite Irish-like, since according to English Law a
marriage is a marriage until Limbus congeals and is used for a
skating-rink.

With the true spirit of chivalry, Sheridan left the questions of
publicity or secrecy to his wife: she could have her freedom if she
wished. He was a fledgling barrister, with his future in front of him,
the child of "strolling players"; she, the beautiful Miss Linlay, was a
singer of note. Her father was the leader of the Bath Orchestra, and had
a School of Oratory where young people agitated the atmosphere in
orotund and tremolo and made the ether vibrate in glee. Doctor Linlay's
daughter was his finest pupil, and with her were elucidated all his
theories concerning the Sixteen Perspective Laws of Art. She also proved
a few points in stirpiculture. She was a most beautiful girl of
seventeen when Richard Brinsley Sheridan led her to the altar, or I
should say to a Dissenting Pastor's back door by night. She could sing,
recite, act, and impersonate in pantomime and Greek gown, the passions
of Fear, Hate, Supplication, Horror, Revenge, Jealousy, Rage and Faith.

Romney moved down to Bath just so as to have Miss Linlay and Lady
Hamilton for models. He posed Miss Linlay as the Madonna, Beulah, Rena,
Ruth, Miriam and Cecilia; and Lady Hamilton for Susannah at the Bath,
Alicia and Andromache, and also had her illustrate the Virtues, Graces,
Fates and Passions.

When the beautiful Miss Linlay, the pride and pet of Bath, got ready to
announce her marriage, she did it by simply changing the inscription
beneath a Romney portrait that hung in the anteroom of the artist's
studio, marking out the words "Miss Linlay," and writing over it, "Mrs.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan."

The Bath porchers who looked after other people's business, having none
of their own, burbled and chortled like siphons of soda, and the marvel
to all was that such a brilliant girl should thus throw herself away on
a sprig of the law. "He acts, too, I believe," said Goldsmith to Doctor
Johnson.

And Doctor Johnson said, "Sir, he does nothing else," thus anticipating
James McNeil Whistler by more than a hundred years.

But alas for the luckless Linlay, the Delsarte of his day, poor man! he
used words not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary, and outdid Cassius
in the quarrel-scene to the Brutus of Richard Brinsley.

But very soon things settled down--they always do when mixed with
time--and all were happy, or reasonably so, forever after.

Herschel resigned from Brabandt's Orchestra and remained in Bath. He
taught music, played the organ, became first violinist for Professor
Linlay and later led the orchestra when Linlay was on the road starring
the one-night stands and his beautiful daughter.

Things seemed to prosper with the kindly and talented German. He was
reserved, intellectual, and was respected by the best. He was making
money--not as London brokers might count money, but prosperous for a
mere music-teacher.

And so there came a day when he bought out the school of Professor
Linlay, and became proprietor and leader of the famous Bath Orchestra.

But the talented Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was sorely missed--a
woman soloist of worth was needed.

Herschel thought and pondered. He tried candidates from London and a few
from Paris. Some had voices, but no intellect. A very few had intellect,
but were without voice. Some thought they had a voice when what they had
was a disease. Other voices he tried and found guilty.

Those who had voice and spirit had tempers like a tornado.

Herschel decided to educate a soloist and assistant. To marry a woman
for the sake of educating her was risky business--he knew of men who had
tried it--for men have tried it since the time of the Cavemen.

A bright thought came to him! He would go back to Deutschland and get
one of his sisters, and bring her over to England to help him do his
work--just the very thing!

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a most fortunate stroke for Herschel when he went back home to
get one of his sisters to come over into Macedonia and help him. No man
ever did a great work unless he was backed up by a good woman. There
were five of these Herschel girls--three were married, so they were out
of the question, and another was engaged. This left Caroline as first,
last and only choice. Caroline was twenty-two and could sing a little.

She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the
father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery
shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that
women should be educated--it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak
of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper.

In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"--and
this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were
the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried
with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who
were not educated--not intellectual--were really not companionable--but
let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a
scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women
themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves.

Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become educated, nor study
the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the
Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if
she went away her prospects were ruined--Ach, Mein Gott! or words to
that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a
weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the
dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline
arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding
Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to
her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing--not only sing
well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo
parts at her brother's concerts, to the great

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/19080