Astronomy, Comets, Meteors, Asteroids cm1396

Oriental Rug Review/Asian Trade is pleased to offer an original article from Century Magazine: "Comets and Meteors, The New Astronomy" by S. P. Langley. This is an original article from Century Magazine, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Jan., 1887, 17 pp. (loose), 9 Illustrations, 6 1/2" x 9 1/2"

About the Subject and/or Author

Samuel Pierpont Langley, 22 August 1834 - 27 February 1906.

A Biographical Sketch of S. P. Langley, From Miscellaneous Scientific Papers of the Allegheny Observatory--New Series. No.19, by John A Brashear; Reprinted from Popular Astronomy, Vol. XIV, 1906.

"The man of grand impulses sheds a lustre on all around him." A great man has gone to his rest. A life filled with the highest aspirations has closed and we are left to mourn the loss of one whose place will be difficult to fill. The writer was associated with Professor Langley for more than thirty years, and in all those years he has only pleasant, aye delightful recollections of his personality, his magnificent intellect--one never satisfied with a half proven hypothesis--but always reaching out for final proof before he announced any of his great discoveries. Not every man who came in contact with Professor Langley knew him as the writer knew him. Many times he walked for miles with him. During the walk nothing would escape his lips but monosyllables. Was he cold--indifferent--callous to the questioner? Far from it. Some difficult--perhaps intricate problem in solar physics or other correlated study had taken possession of his mind to the exclusion of all else, and I have often thought that his "yes" or "no" to my questions were almost of an automatic character. But how different at other times during our walks from the old Observatory to the nearest woods where now is erected the new Astronomical Observatory. Charming was his conversation from the beginning to the end of our stroll. When in this mood no man could be more entertaining and instructive than Professor Langley--indeed some of the most delightful remembrances of my long association with him came to me as I recall these delightful walks and talks.

When he was writing his New Astronomy--he would invite me to come to the Observatory in the evening and read to me a chapter of that splendid book. I call to mind the closing paragraphs of two that impressed me greatly, as he read them and for fear I may not quote verbatim I refer to this chapter on the Moon where, in closing his charming description of its scenery, he says: "Let us leave here the desolation about us, happy that we can come back at will to that world, our own familiar dwelling where the meadows are still green and the birds still sing, and where better yet still dwells our own kind--surely the world, of all we have found in our wanderings, which we should ourselves have chosen to be our home."

Let me also quote the closing paragraph of his chapter on the Stars, which I heard him read "in the long ago," a beautiful illustration of the life history of man as compared to that of the stars: "I have read somewhere a story about a race of ephemeral insects who live about an hour. To those who are born in the early morning the sunrise is the time of youth. They die of old age while his beams are yet gathering force, and only their descendants live on to midday; while it is another race which sees the Sun decline, from that which saw him rise. Imagine the Sun about to set, and the whole nation of mites gathered under the shadow of some mushroom (to them ancient as the Sun itself) to hear what their wisest philosopher has to say of the gloomy prospect. If I remember aright, he first told them that, incredible as it might seem, there was not only a time in the world's youth when the mushroom itself was young, but that the Sun in those early ages was in the eastern, not in the western sky. Since then, he explained, the eyes of scientific ephemera had followed it, and established by induction from vast experience the great "Law of Nature," that it moved only westward; and he showed that since it was now nearing the western horizon, science itself pointed to the conclusion that it was about to disappear forever, together with the great race of ephemera for whom it was created. What his hearers thought of this discourse I do not remember, but I have heard that the Sun rose again the next morning.

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