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So famed he became that some deemed him an alchemist, who possessed the secret called White-and-Yellow, by which stones might be turned into gold; and others thought him a magician, having the ghastly power of murdering men with horror of nightmare, by hiding charmed effigies of them under the tiles of their own roofs; and others, again, averred that he was an astrologer who had discovered the mystery of those Five Hing which influence all things, those Powers that move even in the currents of the star-drift, in the milky Tien-ho, or River of the Sky.
Proctor undertook to chart down the directions and proportionate amounts of about 1,600 proper motions, as determined by Messrs. Stone and Main, with the result of bringing to light the remarkable phenomenon termed by him "star-drift."
The whole question of star-drift has lately assumed a new phase, in consequence of the investigations of Kapteyn, Dyson, and Eddington on the ``systematic motions of the stars. This research will, it is hoped, lead to an understanding of the general law governing the movements of the whole body of stars constituting the visible universe.
And stagnant water is as natural as sterilised water; and diseased tissue is as natural as healthy tissue. Wholesale murder is Nature's first law. She creates only to kill, and applies the rule as remorselessly to the units in a star-drift as to the tadpoles in a horse-pond. "It seems a far cry from a star-drift to a horse-pond. It is so in distance and magnitude.
Another instance of similar ``star-drift'' is furnished by five of the seven stars constituting the figure of the ``Great Dipper. In this case the stars concerned are separated very widely, the two extreme ones by not less than fifteen degrees, so that the idea of a common motion would never have been suggested by their aspect in the sky; and the case becomes the more remarkable from the fact that among and between them there are other stars, some of the same magnitude, which do not share their motion, but are traveling in other directions.
With fiercely eager eyes he and Larmor strove to pierce the lashing mist, and then! oh, yes, the long crimson stream flew, wavered in the gale, and broke into scattered star-drift. Larmor and the doctor put their arms round each other and sobbed. Then they told poor death-like Withers, and his wan eyes flickered with the faint image of a smile.
Nor do I know much about those things, and I am glad that I do not, for if I had devoted my early years of study to plinths, architraves, columns, dados, friezes, pediments, sconces, wainscots, cornices, capitals, entablatures, and such like, how could I have originated my theory of star-drift and how would humanity have been enlightened upon the all-important subjects of the asteroids, the satellites of the star Gamma in Scorpio, the atmosphere on the other side of the moon, the depth of the Martian bottle-neck seas, the probability of the existence of natural gas wells in Jupiter, etc., etc.? If I had been a Linnaeus or a Buffon instead of Reuben Baker, I should have never suffered myself to fall an innocent victim to poison ivy yes, that is true, but at the same time my now famous theory of double stars and my equally famous theory as to the several elements in comets' tails would have been denied to the world.
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