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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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on what they are and what they represent, and try to realize
the place which we men hold in the universe stretched out
before me.
In the busy world of civilization the truths of science
seem to leave little impression. We have so much else to
think of, so much beside to occupy our attention, that they
excite only a momentary feeling of wonder, and we are inclined
to think that, after all, it is a matter of small consequence
what lies beyond our little world. But when we have been
for months cut off from civilization, when there are none of
the distractions of daily life to arrest our attention, then, in
the midst of the desert, or deep in the heart of the mountains,
these truths approach realities. Then it is that we think
over the facts which the science of astronomy presents. The
distance of the stars, so great in certain cases that the light
from them, travelling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-
six thousand miles in every second, must have started before
the birth of Christ to reach the earth in our day; and their
numbers, which are reckoned not by thousands, but by hundreds
of millions, will furnish instances of the truths to which I allude.
Such, we are told, are the distances and number of the stars;
and their size, and the speed at which they are travelling, are
equally marvellous. But what is beyond them? Say we could
travel to the very furthest star that is to be seen from the earth,
what is beyond that? Is that star the limit of everything? is
there yet another hundred million stars beyond? Then, again,
when we learn that all this world, and the sun and the stars,
came from a vast expanse of nebulous gas, where did that gas
come from? And what will happen to all these myriads of
worlds? It is said that the earth will become cold, barren,
and lifeless as the moon, and then be drawn into the sun, which
itself will have expended the last ray of heat it has been giving
out for millions of years, and will go whirling through space,
a cold, dead, lifeless star. Is every star to burn itself out like
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