Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals Part 14

"He told me that a fine-looking, white-headed, good-featured old man was Roget, of the 'Thesaurus;' and another old man in the corner was Dr.

Arnott, of the 'Elements of Physics.' I had supposed he was dead long ago. Afterwards I was introduced to him. He is an old man, but not much over sixty; his hair is white, but he is full of vigor, short and stout, like almost all Englishmen and Englishwomen. I have met only two women taller than myself, and most of them are very much shorter. Dr. Arnott told me he was only now finishing the 'Elements,' which he first published in 1827. He intends now to publish the more mathematical portions with the other volumes. He was very sociable, and I told him he had twenty years ago a great many readers in America. He said he supposed he had more there than in England, and that he believed he had made young men study science in many instances.

"I asked him if Babbage was in the room, and he too said, 'Not yet.' Dr.

Arnott asked me if I wore as many stockings when I was observing as the Herschels--he said Sir William put on twelve pairs and Caroline fourteen!

"I stayed until eleven o'clock, then I said 'Good-by,' and just as I stepped upon the threshold of the drawing-room to go out, a broad old man stepped upon it, and the servant announced 'Mr. Babbage,' and of course that glimpse was all I shall ever have!

"Edinboro', September 30. The people of Edinboro', having a pa.s.sion for Grecian architecture, and being very proud of the Athenian character of their city, seek to increase the resemblance by imitations of ancient buildings.

"Grecian pillars are seen on Calton Hill in great numbers, and the observatory would delight an old Greek; its four fronts are adorned by Grecian pillars, and it is indeed beautiful as a structure; but the Greeks did not build their temples for astronomical observations; they probably adapted their architecture to their needs.

"This beautiful building was erected by an a.s.sociation of gentlemen, who raised a good deal of money, but, of course, not enough. They built the Grecian temple, but they could not supply it with priests.

"About a hundred years ago Colin Maclaurin had laid the foundation of an observatory, and the curious Gothic building, which still stands, is the first germ. We laugh now at the narrow ideas of those days, which seemed to consider an observatory a lookout only; but the first step in a work is a great step--the others are easily taken. There was added to the building of Maclaurin a very small transit room, and then the present edifice followed.

"When the builders of the observatory found that they could not support it, they presented it to the British government; so that it is now a government child, but it is not petted, like the first-born of Greenwich.

"There are three instruments; an excellent transit instrument of six and a half inches' aperture, resting on its y's of solid granite. The corrections of the errors of the instrument by means of little screws are given up, and the errors which are known to exist are corrected in the computations.

"Professor Smyth finds that although the two pillars upon which the instrument rests were cut from the same quarry, they are unequally affected by changes of temperature; so that the variation of the azimuth error, though slight, is irregular.

"The collimation plate they correct with the micrometer, so that they consider some position-reading of the micrometer-head the zero point, and correct that for the error, which they determine by reflection in a trough of mercury. With this instrument they observe on certain stars of the British Catalogue, whose places are not very well determined, and with a mural circle of smaller power they determine declinations.

"The observatory possesses an equatorial telescope, but it is of mixed composition. The object gla.s.s was given by Dr. Lee, the eye-pieces by some one else, and the two are put together in a case, and used by Professor Smyth for looking at the craters in the moon; of these he has made fine drawings, and has published them in color prints.

"The whole staff of the observatory consists of Professor Smyth, Mr.

Wallace, an old man, and Mr. Williamson, a young man.

"The city of Edinboro' has no amateur astronomers, and there are two only, of note, in Scotland: Sir William Bisbane and Sir William Keith Murray.

"From the observatory, the view of Edinboro' is lovely. 'Auld Reekie,'

as the Scotch call it, always looks her best through a mist, and a Scotch mist is not a rare event--so we saw the city under its most becoming veil.

"October, 1857. I stopped in Glasgow a few hours, and went to the observatory, which is also the private residence of Professor Nichol.

Miss Nichol received me, and was a very pleasant, blue-eyed young lady.

"I found that the observatory boasts of two good instruments: a meridian circle, which must be good, from its appearance, and a Newtonian telescope, differently mounted from any I had seen; cased in a composition tube which is painted bright blue--rather a striking object.

The iron mounting seemed to me good. It was of the German kind, but modified. It seemed to me that it could be used for observations far from the meridian. The iron part was hollow, so that the clock was inside, as was the azimuth circle, and thus s.p.a.ce was saved.

"They have a wind and rain self-register, and a self-registering barometer, marking on a cylinder turned by a clock, the paper revolving once an hour.

"When I was at Dungeon Ghyll, a little ravine among the English lakes, down which trickles an exceedingly small stream of water, but which is, nevertheless, very picturesque,--as I followed the old man who shows it for a sixpence, he asked if we had come a long way. 'From America,' I replied. 'We have many Americans here,' said he; 'it is much easier to understand their language than that of other foreigners; they speak very good English, better than the French or Germans.'

"I felt myself a little annoyed and a good deal amused. I supposed that I spoke the language that Addison wrote, and here was a Westmoreland guide, speaking a dialect which I translated into English before I could understand it, complimenting me upon my ability to speak my own tongue.

"I learned afterwards, as I journeyed on, to expect no appreciation of my country or its people. The English are strangely deficient in curiosity. I can scarcely imagine an Englishwoman a gossip.

"I found among all cla.s.ses a knowledge of the extent of America; by the better cla.s.ses its geography was understood, and its physical peculiarities. One astronomer had bound the scientific papers from America in green morocco, as typical of a country covered by forests.

Among the most intelligent men whom I met I found an appreciation of the different characters of the States. Everywhere Ma.s.sachusetts was honored; everywhere I met the horror of the honest Englishman at the slave system; but anything like a discriminating knowledge of our public men I could not meet. Webster had been heard of everywhere. They a.s.sured me that our _really great_ men were known, our really great deeds appreciated; but this is not true. They make mistakes in their measure of our men; second-rate men who have travelled are of course known to the men whom they have met; these travellers have not perhaps thought it necessary to mention that they represent a secondary cla.s.s of people, and they are considered our 'first men.' The English forget that all Americans travel.

"I was vexed when I saw some of our most miserable novels, bound in showy yellow and red, exposed for sale. A friend told me that they had copied from the cheap publications of America. It may be so, but they have outdone us in the cheapness of the material and the showy covers. I never saw yellow and red together on any American book.

"The English are far beyond us in their highest scholarship, but why should they be ignorant of our scholars? The Englishman is proud, and not without reason; but he may well be proud of the American offshoot.

It is not strange that England produces fine scholars, when we consider that her colleges confer fellowships on the best undergraduates.

"England differs from America in the fact that it has a past. Well may the great men of the present be proud of those who have gone before them; it is scarcely to be hoped that the like can come after them; and yet I suppose we must admit that even now the strong minds are born across the water.

"At the same time England has a cla.s.s to which we have happily no parallel in our country--a cla.s.s to which even English gentlemen liken the Sepoys, and who would, they admit, under like circ.u.mstances be guilty of like enormities. But the true Englishman shuts his eyes for a great part of the time to the steps in the social scale down which his race descends, and looks only at the upper walks. He has therefore a glance of patronizing kindness for the people of the United States, and regards us of New England as we regard our rich brethren of the West.

"I wondered what was to become of the English people! Their island is already crowded with people, the large towns are numerous and are very large. Suppose for an instant that her commerce is cut off, will they starve? It is an ill.u.s.tration of moral power that, little island as that of Great Britain is, its power is the great power of the world.

"Crowded as the people are, they are healthy. I never saw, I thought, so many ruddy faces as met me at once in Liverpool. Dirty children in the street have red cheeks and good teeth. Nowhere did I see little children whose minds had outgrown their bodies. They do not live in the school-room, but in the streets. One continually meets little children carrying smaller ones in their arms; little girls hand in hand walk the streets of London all day. There are no free schools, and they have nothing to do. Beggars are everywhere, and as importunate as in Italy.

For a well-behaved common people I should go to Paris; for clean working-women I should look in Paris.

"I saw a little boy in England tormenting a smaller one. He spat upon his cap, and then declared that the little one did it. The little one sobbed and said he didn't. I gave the little one a penny; he evidently did not know the value of the coin, and appealed to the bigger boy. 'Is it a penny?' he asked, with a look of amazement. 'Yes,' said the bigger.

Off ran the smaller one triumphant, and the bigger began to cry, which I permitted him to do."

CHAPTER VII

1857-1858

FIRST EUROPEAN TOUR CONTINUED--LEVERRIER AND THE PARIS OBSERVATORY--ROME--HARRIET HOSMER--OBSERVATORY OF THE COLLEGIO ROMANO--SECCHI

At this time, the feeling between astronomers of Great Britain and those of the United States was not very cordial. It was the time when Adams and Leverrier were contending to which of them belonged the honor of the discovery of the planet Neptune, and each side had its strong partisans.

Among Miss Mitch.e.l.l's papers we find the following with reference to this subject:

"... Adams, a graduate of Cambridge, made the calculations which showed how an unseen body must exist whose influences were felt by Ura.n.u.s. It was a problem of great difficulty, for he had some half-dozen quant.i.ties touching Ura.n.u.s which were not accurately known, and as many wholly unknown concerning the unseen planet. We think it a difficult question which involves three or four unknown quant.i.ties with too few circ.u.mstances, but this problem involved twelve or thirteen, so that x, y, z reached pretty high up into the alphabet. But Adams, having worked the problem, carried his work to Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England, and awaited his comments. A little later Leverrier, the French astronomer, completed the same problem, and waiting for no authority beyond his own, flung his discovery out to the world with the self-confidence of a Frenchman....

"... When the news of the discovery of Neptune reached this country, I happened to be visiting at the observatory in Cambridge, Ma.s.s. Professor Bond (the elder) had looked for the planet the night before I arrived at his house, and he looked again the evening that I came.

"His observatory was then a small, round building, and in it was a small telescope; he had drawn a map of a group of stars, one of which he supposed was not a star, but the planet. He set the telescope to this group, and asking his son to count the seconds, he allowed the stars to pa.s.s by the motion of the earth across the field. If they kept the relative distance of the night before, they were all stars; if any one had approached or receded from the others, it was a planet; and when the father looked at his son's record he said, 'One of those has moved, and it is the one which I thought last night was the planet.' He looked again at the group, and the son said, 'Father, do give me a look at the new planet--you are the only man in America that can do it!' And then we both looked; it looked precisely like a small star, and George and I both asked, 'What made you think last night that it was the new planet?'

Mr. Bond could only say, 'I don't know, it looked different from the others.'

"It is always so--you cannot get a man of genius to explain steps, he leaps.

"After the discovery of this planet, Professor Peirce, in our own country, declared that it was not the planet of the theory, and therefore its discovery was a happy accident. But it seemed to me that it was the planet of the theory, just as much if it varied a good deal from its prescribed place as if it varied a little. So you might have said that Ura.n.u.s was not the Ura.n.u.s of the theory.

"Sir John Herschel said, 'Its movements have been felt trembling along the far-reaching line of our a.n.a.lysis, with a certainty hardly inferior to ocular demonstration.' I consider it was superior to ocular demonstration, as the action of the mind is above that of the senses.

Adams, in his study at Cambridge, England, and Leverrier in his closet at Paris, poring over their logarithms, knew better the locus of that outside planet than all the practical astronomers of the world put together....

"Of course in Paris I went to the Imperial Observatory, to visit Leverrier. I carried letters from Professor Airy, who also sent a letter in advance by post. Leverrier called at my hotel, and left cards; then came a note, and I went to tea.

"Leverrier had succeeded Arago. Arago had been a member of the Provisional Government, and had died. Leverrier took exactly opposite ground, politically, to that of Arago; he stood high with the emperor.