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At present, the aphelion occurs at the time of our northern summer; and the perihelion during the summer of the southern hemisphere.
At that epoch the earth was in her perihelion, and the month of December is so propitious to these shooting stars that astronomers have counted as many as 24,000 an hour. But Michel Ardan, disdaining scientific reasoning, preferred to believe that the earth was saluting with her finest fireworks the departure of her three children.
"It has been calculated that at its perihelion, when nearest to the sun, the earth would have borne a heat equal to 28,000 times that of summer.
It seems that when Galileo and Herschel were little tots I undertook to construct a playhouse for them in the back yard. This was at a time when I was exceptionally busied with my professional studies; Mars was rapidly approaching perihelion, and I had been commissioned by the Blue Island Society of the Arts and Sciences to prepare a chart of the bottle-neck seas.
But, five hundred miles away across the restless, hungry waste of waters is another rock, where penguins steep themselves in sinless voluptuousness; and, with one prolonged, ear-splitting yell, wrung from him by the still-increasing torment of his fell disease, the unhappy bird expands his Paradise-Lost pinions, and, with the speed of a comet passing its perihelion, sweeps away to that rock; for, like Louis XVI., he knows geography.
The actual amount of heat which the earth annually receives from the sun is in no way affected by the eccentricity of its orbit. It is a constant quantity, and only unequally distributed on the earth's surface, being neither increased nor diminished, as our winters occur in aphelion or perihelion.
Its path is an immensely elongated ellipse, lying in a plane far apart from that of the planetary movements, carrying it at perihelion considerably within the orbit of Venus, and at aphelion out into space to 5-1/2 times the distance from the sun of Neptune. The entire circuit occupies over 2,000 years, and is performed in a retrograde direction, or against the order of the Signs.
The latter is perfectly uniform and just fast enough to complete one axial turn in the course of a single revolution about the sun. The accompanying figure may assist the explanation. Let us start with Mercury in perihelion at the point A. The little cross on the planet stands exactly under the sun and in the center of the illuminated hemisphere.
Sir John Herschel very beautifully suggests, that the comet's tail, during this wonderful perihelion passage, resembled a negative shadow cast beyond the comet, rather than a substantial body; a momentary impression made upon the luminiferous ether where the solar influence was in temporary obscuration.
Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men among my acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times, adopted a very similar tone.
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