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The suggestion was that the Teheran astronomers knew their business, and had the good sense to arrange an eclipse when a Royal Visitor wished for one, and so escape decapitation a course which the kindly Shah evidently wished to indicate to the new and young Astronomer Royal as that which he should pursue in order to avoid the fate of his unhappy and obstinate predecessor.
Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy, 'alcohol, 'alembic, 'algebra, 'alkali, 'almanack, 'azimuth, 'cypher, 'elixir, 'magazine, 'nadir, 'tariff, 'zenith, 'zero ? for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them.
Some go through the whole of these changes in three days, and others take much longer. The periods, as the intervals between the complete round of changes are called, vary, in fact, between three days and six hundred! It may seem impossible that changes covering so long as six hundred days could be known and followed, but there is nothing that the patience of astronomers will not compass.
It is true that Herschel's hypothesis has been modified by later astronomers; but his is the credit of having directed them into the right course of inquiry and observation. The physical constitution of the Moon was a subject which also engaged the attention of our indefatigable enthusiast.
Nearly a hundred other nebulae are known, by the spectroscope, to be clouds of luminous gas. It does not follow that they are white-hot, and that the nebula is correctly called a "fire-mist." Electrical and other agencies may make gases luminous, and many astronomers think that the nebulae are intensely cold.
It must increase as they expand, and are lifted before the country to a new elevation. A larger and a smaller sun are sometimes associated, astronomers tell us, to form a binary centre in the heavens, for what is, doubtless, an unseen system receiving from them impulse and light.
The astronomers of his imaginary state scrutinise the stars to discover whether the world will perish or not, and they believe in the oracular saying of Jesus that the end will come like a thief in the night. Therefore they expect a new age, and perhaps also the end of the world. The new age of knowledge was about to begin.
I saw no reason to hope that I should not go on thus forever, revolving around the sun until my bones, whitening among the stars, might be revealed to the superlative powers of some future telescope, and become a subject of absorbing interest, the topic of many a learned paper for the astronomers of a future age.
We must not fail to mention, however, that there is a rival hypothesis which commends itself to many astronomers viz., that the asteroids were formed out of a relatively scant ring of matter, situated between Mars and Jupiter and resembling in composition the immensely more massive rings from which, according to Laplace's hypothesis, the planets were born.
Notwithstanding the speculative character of this volume, it obtained for its author a high name among astronomers. Galileo and Tycho, whose opinions of it he requested, spoke of it with some commendation.
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