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Page 28
The velocities indicated by these movements are incredible. An
up-rush and down-rush at the sides has been measured of twenty
miles a second; a side-rush or whirl, of one hundred and twenty
miles a second. These tempests rage from a few days to half a year,
traversing regions so wide that our Indian Ocean, the realm of
storms, is too small to be used for comparison; then, as they cease,
the advancing sides of the spots approach each other at the rate of
20,000 miles an hour; they strike together, and the rising spray
of fire leaps thousands of miles into space. It falls again into the
incandescent surge, rolls over mountains as the sea over pebbles, and
all this for eon after eon without sign of exhaustion or diminution.
All these swift succeeding Himalayas of fire, where one hundred
worlds could be buried, do not usually prevent the sun's appearing
to our far-off eyes as a perfect sphere.
[Page 94]
_What the Sun does for us._
To what end does this enormous power, this central source of power,
exist? That it could keep all these gigantic forces within itself
could not be expected. It is in a system where every atom is made
to affect every other atom, and every world to influence every
other. The Author of all lives only to do good, to send rain on
the just and unjust, to cause his sun to rise on the evil and the
good, and to give his spirit, like a perpetually widening river,
to every man to profit withal.
The sun reaches his unrelaxing hand of gravitation to every other
world at every instant. The tendency of every world is to fly off
in a straight line. This tendency must be momentarily curbed, and
the planet held in its true curve about the sun. These giant worlds
must be perfectly handled. Their speed, amounting to seventy times
as fast as that of a rifle-ball, must be managed. Each and every
world may be said to be lifted momentarily and swung perpetually
at arm's-length by the power of the sun.
The sun warms us. It would convey but a small idea of the truth
to state how many hundreds of millions of cubic miles of ice could
be hailed at the sun every second without affecting its heat; but,
if any one has any curiosity to know, it is 287,200,000 cubic miles
of ice per second.
We journey through space which has a temperature of 200� below
zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of
perpetual winter. We are roofed over by the air that treasures the
heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat,
[Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains
ripen. The sun has a strange chemical power. It kisses the cold
earth, and it blushes with flowers and matures the fruit and grain.
We are feeble creatures, and the sun gives us force. By it the light
winds move one-eighth of a mile an hour, the storm fifty miles, the
hurricane one hundred. The force is as the square of the velocity.
It is by means of the sun that the merchant's white-sailed ships are
blown safely home. So the sun carries off the miasma of the marsh,
the pollution of cities, and then sends the winds to wash and
cleanse themselves in the sea-spray. The water-falls of the earth
turn machinery, and make Lowells and Manchesters possible, because
the sun lifted all that water to the hills.
Intermingled with these currents of air are the currents of electric
power, all derived from the sun. These have shown their swiftness
and willingness to serve man. The sun's constant force displayed
on the earth is equal to 543,000,000,000 engines of 400-horse power
each, working day and night; and yet the earth receives only
1/21500000000 part of the whole force of the sun.
Besides all this, the sun, with provident care, has made and given
to us coal. This omnipotent worker has stored away in past ages
an inexhaustible reservoir of his power which man may easily mine
and direct, thus releasing himself from absorbing toil.
EXPERIMENTS.
Any one may see the spots on the sun who has a spy-glass. Darken
the room and put the glass through an opening toward the sun, as
shown in Fig. 37. The eye-piece should be drawn out about half
an inch beyond [Page 96] its usual focusing for distant objects. The
farther it is drawn, the nearer must we hold the screen for a
perfect image.
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