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It was a star hurled by the hand of the Creator, and fallen upon the lunar surface! Tycho forms such a luminous concentration that the inhabitants of the earth can see it without a telescope, although they are at a distance of 100,000 leagues. It will, therefore, be readily imagined what its intensity must have been in the eyes of observers placed at fifty leagues only.
There is no more tremendous scene on the moon than this; viewed with a powerful telescope, it is absolutely appalling. The next photograph shows, if possible, a still wilder region. It is the part of the moon lying between Tycho and the south pole. Tycho is seen in the lower left-hand part of the picture.
SAUSSURE. A ring-plain W. of Tycho, 28 miles in diameter, with bright lofty terraced walls and a somewhat dark interior, on which there is a crater, W. of the centre, and some crater-pits. There are several large depressions on the S.W. wall.
The lunar craters differ from those of the earth more fundamentally than in the matter of mere size; they are not situated on the tops of mountains. If they were, and if all the proportions were the same, a crater like Tycho might crown a conical peak fifty or one hundred miles high!
On the moon's side the sight was different; the orb shone in all her splendor amid innumerable constellations, whose purity could not be troubled by her rays. On the disc, the plains were already returning to the dark tint which is seen from the earth. The other part of the nimbus remained brilliant, and in the midst of this general brilliancy Tycho shone prominently like a sun.
Tycho received him with great kindness, notwithstanding the part which he had taken against him along with Raimar, and he spent three or four months with him at Benach.
The opinion that the earth was a globe, which had been conjectured or inferred prior to the voyage of Magellan, was placed beyond a doubt by that voyage. The heavenly bodies were subjected to the calculations of man by the labours of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo.
But the end was approaching the great philosopher, was attacked by low fever, from which he died on the 8th January, 1643. While the illustrious astronomer, Tycho Brahe, lay on his death-bed, he had an interview which must ever rank as one of the important incidents in the history of science.
Nevertheless, as the facts and the theory of refraction were not thoroughly understood, nor Tycho Brahe's tables of refraction generally known, pilot Barendz could not be expected to be wiser than his generation.
Now, though Owens researches were intimately connected with the great labours of Darwin, and afforded the latter material for his epoch-making generalization, yet Owen deliberately refused to accept the new doctrines. Like Tycho, he kept on rigidly accumulating his facts under the influence of a set of ideas as to the origin of living forms which are now universally admitted to be erroneous.
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