maintain a position in the circulation of the joint mass farther This is not improbably Anticipating to a certain from the hand than the lighter. what takes place in the moon. extent what he will find more fully detailed in the next chapter, the reader may consider the moon as retained in her orbit about the earth by some coercing power analogous to that which the hand exerts on the compound mass above described through the string. Suppose, then, its globe made up of materials not homogeneous, and so disposed in its interior that some considerable preponderance of weight should exist excentrically situated: then it will be easily apprehended that the portion of its surface nearer to that heavier portion of its solid content, under all the circumstances of a rotation so adjusted, will permanently occupy the situation most remote from the earth. Let us now consider what may be expected to be the distribution of air, water, or other fluid on the surface of such a globe, supposing its quantity not sufficient to cover and drown the whole It will run towards the lowest place, that is to say, not the nearest to the center of figure or to the central point of the mere space occupied by the moon, but to the center of the mass, or what is called in mechanics the center of gravity. There will be formed there an ocean, of more or less extent according to the quantity of fluid, directly over the heavier nucleus, while the lighter portion of the solid material will stand out as a continent on the opposite side. And the height above the level of such ocean to which it will project will be greater, the greater the excentricity of the center of gravity. Suppose then that in the case of the moon this excentricity should amount to some thirty or forty miles, such would be the general elevation of the lunar land (or the portion turned earthwards) above its ocean, so that the whole of that portion of the moon we see would in fact come to be regarded as a mountainous elevation above the sea level. mass. (436 b.) In what regards its assumption of a definite level, air obeys precisely the same hydrostatical laws as water. The lunar atmosphere would rest upon the lunar ocean, and form in its basin a lake of air, whose upper portions at an altitude such as we are now contemplating, would be of excessive tenuity, especially should the lunar provision of air be less abundant in proportion than our own. It by no means follows, then, from the absence of visible indications of water or air on this side of the moon, that the other is equally destitute of them, and equally unfitted for maintaining animal or vegetable life. Some slight approach to such a state of things actually obtains on the earth itself. Nearly all the land is collected in one of its hemispheres, and much the larger portion of the sea in the opposite (art. 284.). There is evidently an excess of heavy material vertically beneath the middle of the Pacific; while not very remote from the point of the globe diametrically opposite rises the great table-land of India, and the Himalaya chain, on the summits of which the air has not more than a third of the density it has on the sea-level, and from which animated existence is for ever excluded. (437.) The best charts of the lunar surface are those of Cassini, of Russel (engraved from drawings, made by the aid of a seven feet reflecting telescope,) the seleno-topographical charts of Lohrmann, and the very elaborate projection of Beer and Maedler accompanying their work already cited. Madame Witte, a Hanoverian lady, has recently succeeded in producing from her own observations, aided by Maedler's charts, more than one complete model of the whole visible lunar hemisphere, of the most perfect kind, the result of incredible diligence and assiduity. Single craters have also been modelled on a large scale, both by her and Mr. Nasmyth. Still more recently (1851-1863), photography has been applied with success to the exact delineation of the lunar surface, by Mr. Whipple, using for this purpose the great Fraunhofer equatorial of the Observatory at Cambridge, U.S.; by Mr. Hartnup, with the equatorial of the Liverpool Observatory; but more especially by Mr. Delarue, with an equatorially mounted Newtonian reflector of 13 inches aperture and 10 feet focal length.* [See § (437a) in Note I.] OF CHAPTER VIII. TERRESTRIAL GRAVITY. — OF THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION. - PATHS OF PROJECTILES ; APPARENT REAL ITS LAW ORBIT OF THE THE MOON RETAINED IN HER ORBIT BY GRAVITY. (438.) THE reader has now been made acquainted with the chief phenomena of the motions of the earth in its orbit. round the sun, and of the moon about the earth.-We come next to speak of the physical cause which maintains and perpetuates these motions, and causes the massive bodies so revolving to deviate continually from the directions they would naturally seek to follow, in pursuance of the first law of motion, and bend their courses into curves concave to their centers. (439.) Whatever attempts may have been made by metaphysical writers to reason away the connection of cause and effect, and fritter it down into the unsatisfactory relation of habitual sequence †, it is certain that the conception of some more real and intimate connection is quite as strongly impressed upon the human mind as that of the existence of an external world, the vindication of whose reality has (strange Princip. Lex. i. † See Brown" On Cause and Effect," a work of great acuteness and subtlety of reasoning on some points, but in which the whole train of argument is vitiated by one enormous oversight; the omission, namely, of a distinct and immediate personal consciousness of causation in his enumeration of that sequence of events, by which the volition of the mind is made to terminate in the motion of material objects. I mean the consciousness of effort, accompanied with intention thereby to accomplish an end, as a thing entirely distinct from mere desire or volition on the one hand, and from mere spasmodic contraction of muscles on the other. Brown, 3d edit. Edin. 1818, p. 47. (Note to edition of 1833.) to say) been regarded as an achievement of no common merit in the annals of this branch of philosophy. It is our own immediate consciousness of effort, when we exert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and neutralize force, which gives us this internal conviction of power and causation so far as it refers to the material world, and compels us to believe that whenever we see material objects put in motion from a state of rest, or deflected from their rectilinear paths and changed in their velocities if already in motion, it is in consequence of such an EFFORT somehow exerted, though not accompanied with our consciousness. That such an effort should be exerted with success through an interposed space, is no doubt difficult to conceive. But the difficulty is no way alleviated by the interposition of any kind of material communication. The action of mind on matter admits of no explanation in words or elucidation by parallels. We know it as a fact, but are utterly incapable of analysing it as a process. (440.) All bodies with which we are acquainted, when raised into the air and quietly abandoned, descend to the earth's surface in lines perpendicular to it. They are therefore urged thereto by a force or effort, which it is but reasonable to regard as the direct or indirect result of a consciousness and a will existing somewhere, though beyond our power to trace, which force we term gravity, and whose tendency or direction, as universal experience teaches, is towards the earth's center; or rather, to speak strictly, with reference to its spheroidal figure, perpendicular to the surface of still water. But if we cast a body obliquely into the air, this tendency, though not extinguished or diminished, is materially modified in its ultimate effect. The upward impetus we give the stone is, it is true, after a time destroyed, and a downward one communicated to it, which ultimately brings it to the surface, where it is opposed in its further progress, and brought to rest. But all the while it has been continually deflected or bent aside from its rectilinear progress, and made to describe a curved line concave to the earth's center; and having a highest point, vertex, or apogee, just as the moon has in its orbit, where the direction of its motion is perpendicular to the radius. (441.) When the stone which we fling obliquely upwards meets and is stopped in its descent by the earth's surface, its motion is not towards the center, but inclined to the earth's radius at the same angle as when it quitted our hand. As we are sure that, if not stopped by the resistance of the earth, it would continue to descend, and that obliquely, what presumption, we may ask, is there that it would ever reach the center towards which its motion, in no part of its visible course, was ever directed? What reason have we to believe that it might not rather circulate round it, as the moon does round the earth, returning again to the point it set out from, after completing an elliptic orbit of which the earth's center occupies the lower focus? And if so, is it not reasonable to imagine that the same force of gravity may (since we know that it is exerted at all accessible heights above the surface, and even in the highest regions of the atmosphere) extend as far as 60 radii of the earth, or to the moon? and may not this be the power, -for some power there must be,— which deflects her at every instant from the tangent of her orbit, and keeps her in the elliptic path which experience teaches us she actually pursues? (442.) If a stone be whirled round at the end of a string it will stretch the string by a centrifugal force, which, if the speed of rotation be sufficiently increased, will at length break the string, and let the stone escape. However strong the string, it may, by a sufficient rotary velocity of the stone, be brought to the utmost tension it will bear without breaking; and if we know what weight it is capable of carrying, the velocity necessary for this purpose is easily calculated. Suppose, now, a string to connect the earth's center with a weight at its surface, whose strength should be just sufficient to sustain that weight suspended from it. Let us, however, for a moment imagine gravity to have no existence, and that the weight is made to revolve with the limiting velocity which that string can barely counteract: then will its tension be just equal to the weight of the revolving body; and any power which should continually urge the body towards the center with a force equal to its weight would perform the office, and might supply the place of the string, if divided. |