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But no planet or constellation possessed any attraction for the travellers, as long as their eyes could trace that shadowy, crescent-edged, diamond-girdled, meteor-furrowed spheroid, the theatre of their existence, the home of so many undying desires, the mysterious cradle of their race!
The hemisphere of the moon which is actually invisible, will remain invisible for ever. Laplace, in fact, has shown that the attraction of the earth introduces into the rotatory motion of the lunar spheroid the secular inequalities which exist in the movement of revolution. Researches of this nature exhibit in full relief the power of mathematical analysis.
I also secured the split half of a ball, or rather an oblate spheroid, of serpentine with depressions, probably where held by finger and thumb; the same form is still used for grinding in the Istrian island of Veglia. This is one of the few rude stone implements that rewarded our careful search. The north-eastern, which is the main Wady, has a sole uneven with low swells and falls.
It is of the dark brownish shell-tempered ware, characteristic of Arkansas. The lip is much incurved and the base considerably flattened, so that the form is that of a greatly compressed oblate spheroid.
This spheroid is hollow, as are all such forms, for it is slowly increasing in size gradually radiating outward from its centre, but growing proportionately less vivid and more ethereal in appearance as it does so, until at last it loses coherence and fades away much as a wreath of smoke might do.
Judging the organic world from the inorganic, we might expect, a priori, that each species of the former, like crystallized species, would have an approximate limit of form, and even of size, and at the same time that the organic, like the inorganic forms, would present modifications in correspondence with surrounding conditions; but that these modifications would be, not minute and insignificant, but definite and appreciable, equivalent to the shifting of the spheroid on to another facet for support.
Galton, who compares the development of species with a many facetted spheroid tumbling over from one facet, or stable equilibrium, to another. The existence of internal conditions in animals corresponding with such facets is denied by pure Darwinians, but it is contended in this work, though not in this chapter, that something may also be said for their existence.
Alas! what is wanting to our spheroid to reach this perfection is very little! an axis of rotation less inclined on the plane of its orbit." "Well!" cried an impetuous voice, "let us unite our efforts, invent machines, and rectify the earth's axis!" Thunders of applause greeted this proposition, the author of which could be no other than J.T. Maston.
The reason is that when broken in this fashion a whole layer separates easily from its neighbouring layer since each spheroid has to be detached only from the three spheroids of the next layer; of which three there is but one which touches it on its flattened surface, and the other two at the edges.
I mean that, apart from the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes.
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