THE DAILY INFLUENCES OF ASTRONOMY.1 By W. W. CAMPBELL, Lick Observatory, University of California. In the great struggle through which the principal nations have passed, men and women at home labored intensively to maintain their ideals; countless millions of men fought valiantly and many millions died for the ideals of their nations. Quick results, short cuts to the end in view, the achieving of victory regardless of costs, were the order of the day. Suddenly the problems of war gave way to the problems of peace. The intensive methods of war carried over to an unfortunate degree into the days of peace. Human energy, mobilized in behalf of the nation, applied unselfishly for the good of every person in the nation, for the well-being of all the nations, was diverted in regrettable measure to promoting selfish interests. The moral exaltation of the war period was replaced in too many cases by the selfishness of individuals and organizations; by profiteering—a new word, coined to describe widespread conditions. The struggle in Russia, as the extreme case, is direct action for the sudden attainment of certain results, without due consideration for the rights of others. In all countries there are those who, seeing conditions not to their liking, in commerce, in education, in religion, in many phases of daily life, would cut and slash their way through the good, in order to uproot what, in their sight, is bad. This spirit exists in America, and throughout the world, in various degrees. Disturbances in the body politic may ensue for years or a generation by virtue of these attempted short cuts to results, but radical transformations in the social structure of the great modern nations, to endure, must find the people ready for them. The influences which prepare the way for desirable and enduring reforms are not those applied suddenly, but such as operate day and night, continuously, through long periods of time. The revolutions in Russia, in Mexico, in many parts of Latin America attract our attention, but the really serious misfortunes of those lands lie much deeper, in their bad 1 Address on the occasion of the dedication of the Warner and Swasey Observatory, Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, on October 12, 1920. Reprinted by permission from Science, December 10, 1920. social, educational, economic conditions, which are operating unfavorably upon their civilizations every day of the year. We may well inquire what it is that bears a nation onward and upward to greater things. It is unquestionably the spirit of idealism radiating from its various activities. It is the idealism in commercial life: that part of every man's affairs which is conducted with full respect for the rights of others; that part of every man's business which would not, through its publication, injure his good name. It is the idealism of the transportation system, which interchanges commodities to mutual advantage, and acquaints one section of the world with the good things of other sections. It is idealism in banking, in farming, in the honest day's labor at an honest wage. It is idealism in the intellectual life: reverence for the truth, a desire to know the truth, and to live in harmony with the truth in one's surroundings. A pessimist would to-day, as always, receive short shrift, yet I venture to say the world was perhaps never more urgently in need of the biblical advice, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." This expression of great wisdom has never been surpassed as a statement of the principles which govern men of science in their search for the truth. The chief value of scientific method and accurate knowledge lies not in their worship by the intellectual few, not in their applications to industry, but in their influence upon the daily life of the people. The remarkable advance in civilization within the leading nations in recent centuries has been due to the daily and hourly influence of the scientific spirit, more than to any other element. Those nations which possess it are forging ahead by leaps and bounds, and those which do not are dropping out of the race. The unscientific nations are threatened with absorption by their more scientific neighbors, not so much because they do not invent or perfect the most powerful cannon, the sturdiest dreadnaught, the speediest airplane, or the subtlest submarine, but because the scientific nations are forging ahead of them in the arts of peace, in the modes of thought, in the affairs of daily life. The unscientific nations are without serious influence in the world, not because they are unwarlike-the Turks and essentially all Mohammedans are warlike enough to suit everybody-but because they are lacking in the vision and the efficiency which accompany the scientific spirit.2 History affords no more remarkable phenomenon than the retrograde movement in civilization which began with the decline of the Roman power and continued through more than a thousand years. This and the following paragraph have been taken, with but few changes, from one of my earlier addresses.-W. W. C. There had once existed a wonderful Greek civilization, but for twelve or fifteen centuries it was so nearly suppressed as to be without serious influence upon the life of the European peoples. Greek literature, one of the world's priceless possessions, not surpassed by the best modern literatures, was as complete two thousand years ago as it is to-day. Yet in the Middle Ages, if we except a few scattered churchmen, it was lost to the European world. A Greek science. never existed. Now and then, it is true, a Greek philosopher taught that the earth is round, or that the earth revolves around the sun, or speculated upon the constitution of matter; but excepting the geometry of Euclid and Archimedes, we may say that nothing was proved, and that no serious efforts were made to obtain proofs. There could be no scientific spirit in the Greek nation and Greek civilization so long as the Greek religion lived, and the Greek people and government consulted and were guided by the oracles. If there had been a Greek science equal in merit to modern science, think you that stupidity and superstition could have secured a stranglehold upon Greek civilization and have maintained a thousand years of ignorance and mental degradation? Intellectual life could not prosper in Europe so long as dogma in Italy, only three hundred years ago, in the days of Bruno and Galileo, was able to say, "Animals which move have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move;" or as long as dogma in Massachusetts, only 250 years ago, was able to hang by the neck until dead the woman whom it charged with "giving a look toward the great meeting house of Salem, and immediately a demon entered the house and tore down a part of the wainscoting." The morals and the intellect of the world had reached a deplorable state at the epoch of the Borgias. It was the re-birth of science, chiefly of astronomy, as exemplified by the work of Columbus and Copernicus, and secondly the growth of medical science, which gave to the people of Europe the power to dispel gradually the unthinkable conditions of the Middle Ages. It has been said that we may judge of the degree of civilization of a nation by the provision which the people of the nation have made for the study of astronomy. A review of present-day nations is convincing that the statement represents the approximate truth. It is essentially true even of sections of our own country. In our first years as a nation a few small telescopes were in private hands, here and there; they were used merely for occasional looking at the stars; there were no observatories in the United States-no telescopes suitably mounted and housed for the serious study of the stars. The founding of the third American observatory, at Hudson, Ohio, about 1839, only a year or two after the completion of the second observa tory, at Williams College, Massachusetts, was an admirable index to the intellectual outlook of the Western Reserve. The laying of the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Observatory in 1843, a wonderfully ambitious institution for its day, was an event considered by ExPresident John Quincy Adams to be worthy of a hard trip, in the seventy-seventh year of his life, by rail from Massachusetts to Buffalo, by lake steamer to Cleveland, by four days of miserable canal boat to Columbus, and thence on to Cincinnati, to deliver the formal address then called an oration. Adams's task was, to quote his words, "To turn this enthusiasm for astronomy at Cincinnati into a permanent and persevering national pursuit, which may extend the bounds of human knowledge, and make the country instrumental in elevating the character and improving the condition of man upon earth." Our former slave states have to-day only one active observatory, at the University of Virginia, presented by McCormick, of Chicago. Barnard and other astronomical enthusiasts, born and grown to manhood in the south, have found their opportunities in the great northern observatories, with Olivier, of the University of Virginia, as the sole exception. What is true of astronomy in the south is true, in general, of the other sciences. This unfortunate situation is the natural product of the false, unscientific system of labor which, prevailing through many generations, taught that it is undignified for the white man to eat bread by the sweat of his own brow. Financial recovery, following 1865, has accordingly been slow. The future will correct this, for the men of the south are our blood brothers. We should be, and are, sympathetic. Shall we try to estimate what astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, sometimes called an ideal and unpractical science, has done for mankind? Here are some of the applications of astronomy to daily life: 1. Observations of the stars with the transit instrument, such as exists in this observatory, are supplying the nations with accurate time. Two astronomers, with modern instrumental equipment, situated on the same north and south line, may observe the stars so accurately, in comparison with the beats of their common clock, that they will agree within two or three hundredths of a second as to how much that clock is fast or slow. 2. The accurate maps of the continents and islands depend upon the astronomical determinations of the latitudes and longitudes of their salient features. 3. The sailing of ships over long courses, say from the Golden Gate to Sydney, Australia, or from New York to the Cape of Good The northeastern part of Ohio constitutes the "Western Reserve." Hope, depends upon the A B C's of astromony. Given fair skies the navigator may locate his ship in the middle of the broad ocean within a mile of its true position. 4. In America it is the habit to call upon the astronomers to fix the boundary lines between nations by observations of the stars; for example, along the 49th parallel of latitude, from Rainy Lake, Minn., westward almost to the Pacific Ocean. The uncertainty as to where this imaginary line falls upon the ground is nowhere greater than 10 or 15 feet, and it has not been found necessary by us, nor by our friends in Canada, to maintain military forts along that line. 5. The times of high and low tides, vital to mariners in entering many harbors, are determined by or from the work of the astrono mers. We do not dwell upon these responses to the immediate needs of the world, for they are unimportant in comparison with the contributions of the pure knowledge side of astronomy to progressive civilization. Let us think of the earth as eternally shrouded in thick clouds, so that terrestrial dwellers could never see the sun, the moon, the comets, the stars, and the nebulæ, but not so thick that the sun's energy would fail to penetrate to the soil and grow the crops. Under these conditions we might know the earth's surface strata to the depth of a mile or two. We might know the mountains and the atmosphere to a height of 4 or 5 miles. We might acquire a knowledge of the oceans, but we should be creatures of exceedingly narrow limits. Our vision, our life, would be confined to a stratum of earth and air only 4 or 5 miles thick. It would be as if the human race went about its work of raising corn for food and cotton for raiment, always looking down, never looking up, knowing nothing of the universe except an insignificantly thin stratum of the little earth. This picture is only a moderately unfair view of life as it existed on our planet 400 years ago, before the days of the telescope, the spectroscope, and the photographic plate, before the days of freedom of speech and thought, which came with the scientific spirit. The earth is for us no longer flat, supported on the back of a great turtle, which rests upon nothing. It is round, and every civilized person knows that it is. Exists there an intelligent man in the world whose thoughts, every day and many times a day, are not unconsciously adapted to this fact? This. knowledge is a chief inheritance of the new generations. It is fundamental in our civilization. People know that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening, and why. A round earth, rotating upon its axis in a dependable way and revolving around the sun in exact obedience to law, are truths incomparably more sublime than the fiction of the flat earth which was pictured hazily in men's minds during pre-Copernican days. Who can estimate the value of this |