1817-18...] JOHN B. GOUGH. Our cause is a progressive one. I read the first constitution of the first temperance society formed in the State of New York in 1809, and one of the by-laws stated, “ Any member of this association who shall be convicted of intoxication shall be fined a quarter of a dollar, except such act of intoxication shall take place on the 4th of July, or any other regularly-appointed military muster." We laugh at that now; but it was a serious matter in those days; it was in advance of the public sentiment of the age. The very men that adopted that principle were persecuted; they were hooted and pelted through the streets, the doors of their houses were blackened, their cattle mutilated. The fire of persecution scorched some men so, that they left the work. Others worked on and God blessed them. Some are living to-day; and I should like to stand where they stand now, and see the mighty enterprise as it rises before them. They worked hard. They lifted the first turf-prepared the bed in which to lay the corner-stone. They laid it amid persecution and storm. They worked under the surface, and then commenced another storm of persecution. Now you see the superstructure-pillar after pillar, tower after tower, column after column, with the capitals emblazoned with "Love, truth, sympathy, and good will to men." Old men gaze upon it as it grows up before them. They will not live to see it completed, but they see in faith the crowning copestone set upon it. Meek-eyed women weep as it grows in beauty; children strew the pathway of the workmen with flowers. We do not see its beauty yet we do not see the magnificence of its superstructure yetbecause it is in course of erection. Scaffolding, ropes, ladders, workmen ascending and descending, mar the beauty of the building; but, by-and-by, when the hosts who have laboured shall come up over a thousand battle fields, waving with bright grain never again to be crushed in the distillery-through vineyards, under trellised vines, with grapes hanging in all their purple glory, never again to be pressed into that which can debase and degrade mankind-when they shall come through orchards, under trees hanging thick with golden, pulpy fruit, never to be turned into that which can injure and debase-when they shall come up to the last distillery and destroy it; to the last stream of liquid death and dry it up; to the last weeping wife and wipe her tears gently away; to the last little child and lift him up to stand where God meant that man should stand; to the last drunkard and nerve him to burst the burning fetters, and make a glorious accompaniment to the song of freedom by the clanking of his broken chains-then, ah! then, will the copestone be set upon it, the scaffolding will fall with a crash, and the building will start in its wondrous beauty before an astonished world. The last poor drunkard shall go into it and find a refuge there; loud shouts of rejoicing shall be heard, and there shall be joy in heaven, when the triumphs of a great enterprise shall usher in the day of the triumphs of the cross of Christ. I believe it; on my soul I believe it. Will you help us? That is the question. We leave it with you. Good night. JOHN TYNDALL. `HIS able natural philosopher was born in Ireland about 1820. He was Survey the United dom, in 1848 proceeded to Germany, where at Marburg and at Berlin he pursued his studies, and in 1853 was elected Professor of Natural History in the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He is the author of "The Glaciers of the Alps," 1860; "Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion,” 1863; “Faraday as a Discoverer," 1868; and other works. He was made an LL.D. of Cambridge in 1855, and an LL.D. of Edinburgh in 1866, when Mr. Carlyle was installed Rector of that University. The specimen given below is the concluding portion of Professor Tyndall's "Lectures on Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion," delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the season of 1852. GRAND The Sun and its Relation to Life. and marvellous as are questions regarding the physical constitution of the sun, they are but a portion of the wonders connected with our luminary. His relationship to life is yet to be referred to. The earth's atmosphere contains carbonic acid, and the earth's surface bears living plants; the former is the nutriment of the latter. The plant apparently seizes the combined carbon and oxygen; tears them asunder, storing up the carbon, and letting the oxygen go free. By no special force, different in quality from other forces, do plants exercise this power,—the real magician here is the sun. We have seen in former lectures* how heat is consumed in forcing asunder the atoms and molecules of solids and liquids, converting itself into potential energy, which re-appeared as heat, when the attractions of the separated atoms were again allowed to come into play. Precisely the same considerations which we then applied to heat we have now to apply to light, for it is at the expense of the solar light that the decomposition of the carbonic acid is effected. Without the sun the reduction cannot take place, and an amount of sunlight is consumed exactly equivalent to the molecular work accomplished. Thus trees are formed, thus the meadows grow, thus the flowers bloom. Let the solar rays fall upon a surface of sand, the sand is heated and finally radiates away as much as it receives; let the same rays fall upon a forest, the quantity of heat given back is less than that received, for the energy of a portion of the sunbeams is invested in the building of the trees.† I have here a bundle of cotton, which I ignite; it bursts into flame and yields a definite amount of heat; precisely that amount of heat was abstracted from the sun in order to form that bit of cotton. This is a representative * See Lecture V. of "Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion," &c. + Mayer, "Die Organische Bewegung," p. 39. 1820-18...] JOHN TYNDALL. case; every tree, plant, and flower, grows and flourishes by the grace and bounty of the sun. * In But we cannot stop at vegetable life; for this is the source, mediate or immediate, of all animal life. In the animal body, vegetable substances are brought again into contact with their beloved oxygen, and they burn within us, as a fire burns in a grate. This is the source of all animal power; and the forces in play are the same in kind as those which operate in inorganic nature. In the plant the clock is wound up, in the animal it runs down. In the plant the atoms are separated, in the animal they re-combine. And as surely as the force which moves a clock's hands is derived from the arm which winds up the clock, so surely is all terrestrial power drawn from the sun. Leaving out of account the eruption of volcanoes, and the ebb and flow of the tide, every mechanical action on the earth's surface, every manifestation of power, organic and inorganic, vital and physical, is produced by the sun. His warmth keeps the sea liquid, and the atmosphere a gas, and all the storms which agitate both are blown by the mechanical force of the sun. He lifts the rivers and the glaciers up the mountains; and then the cataract and the avalanche shoot with an energy derived immediately from him. Thunder and lightning are also his transmuted strength. Every fire that burns and every flame that glows dispenses light and heat which originally belonged to the sun. these days, unhappily, the news of battle is familiar to us, but every shock, and every charge, is an application, or misapplication, of the mechanical force of the sun. He blows the trumpet, he urges the projectile, he bursts the bomb. And remember, this is not poetry, but rigid mechanical truth. He rears, as I have said, the whole vegetable world, and through it the animal: the lilies of the field are his workmanship, the verdure of the meadows, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. He forms the muscle, he urges the blood; he builds the brain. His fleetness is in the lion's foot; he springs in the panther, he soars in the eagle, he slides in the snake. He builds the forest and hews it down, the power which raised the tree and which wields the axe being one and the same. The clover sprouts and blossoms, and the scythe of the mower swings by the operation of the same force. The sun digs the ore from our mines; he rolls the iron; he rivets the plates; he boils the water; he draws the train. He not only grows the cotton, but he spins the fibre and weaves the web. There is not a hammer raised, a wheel turned, or a shuttle thrown, that is not raised, and turned, and thrown by the sun. His energy is poured freely into space, but our world is a halting-place where this energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells; the selfsame essence takes a million shapes and hues, and finally dissolves into its primitive and almost * The germ, and much more than the germ, of what is here stated, is to be found in a paragraph in Sir John Herschel's "Outlines of Astronomy," published in 1833.-Tyndall. formless form. The sun comes to us as heat; he quits us as heat; and between his entrance and departure the multiform powers of our globe appear. They are all special forms of solar power-the monds into which his strength is temporarily poured, in passing from its source through infinitude. Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than have ever yet been addressed to the intellect and imagination of man. The natural philosopher of to-day may dwell amid conceptions which beggar those of Milton. So great and grand are they, that in the contemplation of them, a certain force of character is requisite to preserve us from bewilderment. Look at the integrated energies of our world-the stored power of our coal-fields; our winds and rivers; our fleets, armies, and guns. What are they? They are all generated by a portion of the sun's energy, which does not amount to 2300000000th of the whole. This, in fact, is the entire fraction of the sun's force intercepted by the earth, and, in reality, we convert but a small fraction of this fraction into mechanical energy. Multiplying all our powers by millions of millions, we do not reach the sun's expenditure. And still, notwithstanding this enormous drain in the lapse of human history, we are unable to detect a diminution of his store. Measured by our largest terrestrial standards, such a reservoir of power is infinite; but it is our privilege to rise above these standards, and to regard the sun himself as a speck in infinite extension-a mere drop in the universal sea. We analyse the space in which he is immersed, and which is the vehicle of his power. We pass to other systems and other suns, each pouring forth energy like our own, but still without infringement of the law, which reveals immutability in the midst of change, which recognizes incessant transference and conversion, but neither final gain nor loss. This law generalizes the aphorism of Solomon, that there is nothing new under the sun, by teaching us to detect everywhere, under this infinite variety of appearances, the same primeval force. To nature nothing can be added; from nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, and out of one of them to form another. The law of conservation rightly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves-magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude-asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into flora and faunæ, and flora and faunæ melt into air-the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music throughout the ages, and all terrestrial energy-the manifestations of life, as well as the display of phenomena-are but the modulations of its rhythm. |