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Go into any smart billiard-room nowadays, or make a round of the various race meetings, and you will see something to make you sad. You see one vast precession of Rakes making their mad Progress. Bob was always kindly with me, as, indeed, he was with everybody. The very bookmakers scarcely had the heart to offer him false prices, and only the public-house spongers gave him no law.
At this rate of precession, which modern, calculation has confirmed, it requires 71 2-3 years for the Cardinal points to pass through one degree on the Ecliptic, and 2150 years through thirty degrees, or one sign of the Zodiac.
To understand this feature of precession we should first note that it means that each year the change from the winter to the summer or, as we phrase it, the passage of the equinoctial line occurs a little sooner than the year before. The cause of this is to be found in the attraction which the heavenly bodies, practically altogether the moon, exercises on the equatorial protuberance of the earth.
I give you the United States, bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment!"
Another finds that the phenomena of precession and nutation require that the earth, if not entirely solid, must at least have a shell not less than eight hundred to a thousand miles in thickness. So there you are. You may take your choice." "And if it should prove solid?" I asked. "It will be all the same to us in the end, David," replied Perry.
Thirdly, the variations in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, combined with the precession of the equinoxes and the rotation of the apsides, may be regarded as operative. The last of all, changes in the constitution of the atmosphere, have to be taken into account.
Hence, the tourist to the Nile valley, when viewing, near the base of old Cheops, the great Egyptian pyramid, a colossal head and bust of a woman, carved in stone, and learns that it is attached to a body, in the form of a lion in a crouching attitude 146 feet long, hidden beneath the shifting sands of the Libyan desert; if possessed of the knowledge of the precession of the Equinoxes, he will be enabled to solve the riddle of the Sphinx by recognizing in that grotesque monument the mid-summer symbol of solar worship, when the Summer Solstice was between the signs of Leo and Virgo.
In connection with Hipparchus' great discovery it may be mentioned that modern astronomers have often attempted to fix dates in history by the effects of precession of the equinoxes. At about the date when the Great Pyramid may have been built gamma Draconis was near to the pole, and must have been used as the pole-star.
Explosion and convulsion are necessary to the maintenance of either hypothesis: for La Place has demonstrated, that the precession of the equinoxes is only a secular equation of a very long period, which, of course, proves nothing either on one side or the other." They now emerged, by a winding ascent, from the vale of Llanberris, and after some little time arrived at Bedd Gelert.
Whatever idea may be adopted on this subject, if it is very certain that, independent of those exterior causes, which are competent to totally change its face, as the impulse of a comet may do, this globe contains within itself, a cause adequate to alter it entirely, since, besides the diurnal and sensible motion of the earth, it has one extremely slow, almost imperceptible, by which every thing must eventually be changed in it: this is the motion from whence depends the precession of the equinoctial points, observed by Hipparchus and other mathematicians, now well understood by astronomers; by this motion, the earth must at the end of several thousand years change totally: this motion will at length cause the ocean to occupy that space which at present forms the lands or continents.
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