Abstract
THIS is a second and freshly-arranged edition of a comprehensive little treatise on the nature of the solar system. It requires no great acquaintance with the present state of science to vindicate the accuracy of the author's preliminary remark, as to the difficulty that students experience from the wide dispersion of modern observations among heterogeneous memoirs and journals in various languages, and the necessity of a large library and abundance of leisure; and it is impossible not to appreciate his attempt to combine these scattered materials in a condensed and accessible form. Nor can it be doubted that a considerable amount of labour has been devoted to the work, which has been made attractive by perspicuity of treatment and facility of style, as well as by occasional ingenuity in hypothesis. Yet the execution cannot be said to correspond with the excellency of the design; and the deficiency, more apparent perhaps to our own minds than to those of Continental readers, is such as necessarily results from one-sided and imperfect views. The eternity of matter, an idea to many minds especially and utterly abhorrent, should not, to say the least of it, have been assumed; and other less objectionable hypotheses and statements are adopted, which may not be as incontrovertible as unwary readers will be led to suppose. No doubt the author, in employing as part of his motto the words of Darwin, “False facts are highly injurious to the cause of science,” was quite unconscious that the result of an inquiry into some of his own facts (or rather assertions) would not be quite satisfactory. But we do not know what to make of such statements as these—that Priestley called his vital air (oxygen) by the name of Phlogiston—that Huggins found in the nuclei of comets the lines of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon similar to those given by the Geissler tubes—that there are two bright lines in the spectrum of Sirius, one of which is displaced by the star's movement—that the red, green, and yellow tints of the aurora never lose their relative positions; that the force of gravity at the upper limit of the atmosphere may be considered not materially different from that on the earth's surface, while the centrifugal (tangential) force perceptibly increases. Nothing but an unkind, or bitter, or self-ignorant spirit would refuse to leave a fairly broad margin for inevitable human imperfection; but it must be a very large paper copy indeed that would find room for statements such as these. Nor is it easy to understand why Lockyer's just claim should have been ignored to an equal share with Janssen in the grand discovery of prominences round the uneclipsed sun; or why discredit should have been thrown upon the connection of the solar-spot maximum with Sabine's magnetic period, or the planetary one established by the Kew observers. Other omissions might be pointed out, and the work would have been greatly improved by a discussion of the effects of temperature and pressure in modifying elementary spectra—a branch of inquiry to which allusion has barely been made, but which is of essential importance in spectrum analysis, and the fuller development of which alone, perhaps, promises a more satisfactory solution of many cosmical phenomena. But while it appeared a matter of duty to mention these deficiencies, we must add, in all fairness, and with greater pleasure, that some of his theories are very interesting and well handled; such as that in which he would account for the eruption of the protuberances by the unstable condition of gaseous matter on the confines of fluidity, discovered by Andrews and Thomson; or that of the unlimited extension through space of the planetary atmospheres in extreme tenuity; and there is much ingenuity, at any rate, in the idea of accounting for the variations of atmospheric pressure and electricity between the tropics by the resistance, however infinitesimal, which our globe sustains in its rapid passage through a space to which neither Newton nor Laplace ascribed absolute vacuity. The curious inconsistency with which, as a denier of equivocal generation, he calls in the germs of terrestrial vegetation from external space, where they have been educed under certain conditions of temperature, pressure, and time, is but a specimen of the difficulties to which every hypothesis is subject, that ignores the existence of an omnipotent will; but there are some who will look with amusement, and some few with a warmer feeling, at his vigorous onslaught on the idea of a luminiferous æther; concluding with the keen remark, that to prove the existence of such an æther, recourse is had in turn to the very phenomena which it was invented to explain.
Meibauer's Physische Beschaffenheit des Sonnensystems.
(Berlin: Carl Habel.)
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
W., T. Meibauer's Physische Beschaffenheit des Sonnensystems . Nature 6, 140 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006140a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006140a0