The Reminiscences of an Astronomer Part 21

The instruments which Struve designed sixty years ago still do as fine work as any in the world; but one may suspect this to be due more to the astronomers who handle them than to the instruments themselves.

The air is remarkably clear; the entrance to St. Petersburg, ten or twelve miles north, is distinctly visible, and Struve told me that during the Crimean war he could see, through the great telescope, the men on the decks of the British ships besieging Kronstadt, thirty miles away.

One drawback from which the astronomers suffer is the isolation of the place. The village at the foot of the little hill is inhabited only by peasants, and the astronomers and employees have nearly all to be housed in the observatory buildings. There is no society but their own nearer than the capital. At the time of my visit the scientific staff was almost entirely German or Swedish, by birth or language. In the state, two opposing parties are the Russian, which desires the ascendency of the native Muscovites, and the German, which appreciates the fact that the best and most valuable of the Tsar's subjects are of German or other foreign descent. During the past twenty years the Russian party has gradually got the upper hand; and the result of this ascendency at Pulkova will be looked for with much solicitude by astronomers everywhere.

Once a year the lonely life of the astronomers is enlivened by a grand feast--that of the Russian New Year. One object of the great dining-room which I have mentioned, the largest room, I believe, in the whole establishment, was to make this feast possible. My visit took place early in March, so that I did not see the celebration; but from what I have heard, the little colony does what it can to make up for a year of ennui. Every twenty-five years it celebrates a jubilee; the second came off in 1889.

There is much to interest the visitor in a Russian peasant village, and that of Pulkova has features some of which I have never seen described. Above the door of each log hut is the name of the occupant, and below the name is a rude picture of a bucket, hook, or some other piece of apparatus used in extinguishing fire.

Inside, the furniture is certainly meagre enough, yet one could not see why the occupants should be otherwise than comfortable.

I know of no good reason why ignorance should imply unhappiness; altogether, there is some good room for believing that the less civilized races can enjoy themselves, in their own way, about as well as we can. What impressed me as the one serious hardship of the peasantry was their hours of labor. Just how many hours of the twenty-four these beings find for sleep was not clear to the visitor; they seemed to be at work all day, and at midnight many of them had to start on their way to St. Petersburg with a cartload for the market. A church ornamented with tinsel is a feature of every Russian village; so also are the priests. The only two I saw were sitting on a fence, wearing garments that did not give evidence of having known water since they were made. One great drawback to the growth of manufactures in Russia is the number of feast days, on which the native operators must one and all abandon their work, regardless of consequences.

The astronomical observations made at Pulkova are not published annually, as are those made at most of the other national observatories; but a volume relating to one subject is issued whenever the work is done. When I was there, the volumes containing the earlier meridian observations were in press. Struve and his chief a.s.sistant, Dr. Wagner, used to pore nightly over the proof sheets, bestowing on every word and detail a minute attention which less patient astronomers would have found extremely irksome.

Dr. Wagner was a son-in-law of Hansen, the astronomer of the little ducal observatory at Gotha, as was also our Bayard Taylor. My first meeting with Hansen, which occurred after my return to Berlin, was accompanied with some trepidation. Modest as was the public position that he held, he may now fairly be considered the greatest master of celestial mechanics since Laplace. In what order Leverrier, Delaunay, Adams, and Hill should follow him, it is not necessary to decide.

To many readers it will seem singular to place any name ahead of that of the master who pointed out the position of Neptune before a human eye had ever recognized it. But this achievement, great as it was, was more remarkable for its boldness and brilliancy than for its inherent difficulty. If the work had to be done over again to-day, there are a number of young men who would be as successful as Leverrier; but there are none who would attempt to reinvent the methods of Hansen, or even to improve radically upon them.

Their main feature is the devising of new and refined methods of computing the variations in the motions of a planet produced by the attraction of all the other planets. As Laplace left this subject, the general character of these variations could be determined without difficulty, but the computations could not be made with mathematical exactness. Hansen's methods led to results so precise that, if they were fully carried out, it is doubtful whether any deviation between the predicted and the observed motions of a planet could be detected by the most refined observation.

At the time of my visit Mrs. Wagner was suffering from a severe illness, of which the crisis pa.s.sed while I was at Pulkova, and left her, as was supposed, on the road to recovery. I was, of course, very desirous of meeting so famous a man as Hansen. He was expected to preside at a session of the German commission on the transit of Venus, which was to be held in Berlin about the time of my return thither from Pulkova. The opportunity was therefore open of bringing a message of good news from his daughter. Apart from this, the prospect of the meeting might have been embarra.s.sing.

The fact is that I was at odds with him on a scientific question, and he was a man who did not take a charitable view of those who differed from him in opinion.

He was the author of a theory, current thirty or forty years ago, that the farther side of the moon is composed of denser materials than the side turned toward us. As a result of this, the centre of gravity of the moon was supposed to be farther from us than the actual centre of her globe. It followed that, although neither atmosphere nor water existed on our side of the moon, the other side might have both. Here was a very tempting field into which astronomical speculators stepped, to clothe the invisible hemisphere of the moon with a beautiful terrestrial landscape, and people it as densely as they pleased with beings like ourselves. If these beings should ever attempt to explore the other half of their own globe, they would find themselves ascending to a height completely above the limits of their atmosphere. Hansen himself never countenanced such speculations as these, but confined his claims to the simple facts he supposed proven.

In 1868 I had published a little paper showing what I thought a fatal defect, a vicious circle in fact, in Hansen's reasoning on this subject. Not long before my visit, Delaunay had made this paper the basis of a communication to the French Academy of Sciences, in which he not only indorsed my views, but sought to show the extreme improbability of Hansen's theory on other grounds.

When I first reached Germany, on my way from Italy, I noticed copies of a blue pamphlet lying on the tables of the astronomers.

Apparently, the paper had been plentifully distributed; but it was not until I reached Berlin that I found it was Hansen's defense against my strictures,--a defense in which mathematics were not unmixed with seething sarcasm at the expense of both Delaunay and myself. The case brought to mind a warm discussion between Hansen and Encke, in the pages of a scientific journal, some fifteen years before. At the time it had seemed intensely comical to see two enraged combatants--for so I amused myself by fancying them--hurling algebraic formulae, of frightful complexity, at each other's heads.

I did not then dream that I should live to be an object of the same sort of attack, and that from Hansen himself.

To be revised, pulled to pieces, or superseded, as science advances, is the common fate of most astronomical work, even the best.

It does not follow that it has been done in vain; if good, it forms a foundation on which others will build. But not every great investigator can look on with philosophic calm when he sees his work thus treated, and Hansen was among the last who could. Under these circ.u.mstances, it was a serious question what sort of reception Hansen would accord to a reviser of his conclusions who should venture to approach him. I determined to a.s.sume an att.i.tude that would show no consciousness of offense, and was quite successful. Our meeting was not attended by any explosion; I gave him the pleasant message with which I was charged from his daughter, and, a few days later, sat by his side at a dinner of the German commission on the coming transit of Venus.

As Hansen was Germany's greatest master in mathematical astronomy, so was the venerable Argelander in the observational side of the science. He was of the same age as the newly crowned Emperor, and the two were playmates at the time Germany was being overrun by the armies of Napoleon. He was held in love and respect by the entire generation of young astronomers, both Germans and foreigners, many of whom were proud to have had him as their preceptor. Among these was Dr. B. A. Gould, who frequently related a story of the astronomer's wit. When with him as a student, Gould was beardless, but had a good head of hair. Returning some years later, he had become bald, but had made up for it by having a full, long beard.

He entered Argelander's study unannounced. At first the astronomer did not recognize him.

"Do you not know me, Herr Professor?"

The astronomer looked more closely. "Mine Gott! It is Gould mit his hair struck through!"

Argelander was more than any one else the founder of that branch of his science which treats of variable stars. His methods have been followed by his successors to the present time. It was his policy to make the best use he could of the instruments at his disposal, rather than to invent new ones that might prove of doubtful utility.

The results of his work seem to justify this policy.

We pa.s.sed the last month of the winter in Berlin waiting for the war to close, so that we could visit Paris. Poor France had at length to succ.u.mb, and in the latter part of March, we took almost the first train that pa.s.sed the lines.

Delaunay was then director of the Paris Observatory, having succeeded Leverrier when the emperor petulantly removed the latter from his position. I had for some time kept up an occasional correspondence with Delaunay, and while in England, the autumn before, had forwarded a message to him, through the Prussian lines, by the good offices of the London legation and Mr. Washburn. He was therefore quite prepared for our arrival. The evacuation of a country by a hostile army is rather a slow process, so that the German troops were met everywhere on the road, even in France. They had left Paris just before we arrived; but the French national army was not there, the Communists having taken possession of the city as fast as the Germans withdrew. As we pa.s.sed out of the station, the first object to strike our eyes was a flaming poster addressed to "Citoyens,"

and containing one of the manifestoes which the Communist government was continually issuing.

Of course we made an early call on Mr. Washburn. His career in Paris was one of the triumphs of diplomacy; he had cared for the interests of German subjects in Paris in such a way as to earn the warm recognition both of the emperor and of Bismarck, and at the same time had kept on such good terms with the French as to be not less esteemed by them. He was surprised that we had chosen such a time to visit Paris; but I told him the situation, the necessity of my early return home, and my desire to make a careful search in the records of the Paris Observatory for observations made two centuries ago. He advised us to take up our quarters as near to the observatory as convenient, in order that we might not have to pa.s.s through the portions of the city which were likely to be the scenes of disturbance.

We were received at the observatory with a warmth of welcome that might be expected to accompany the greeting of the first foreign visitor, after a siege of six months. Yet a tinge of sadness in the meeting was unavoidable. Delaunay immediately began lamenting the condition of his poor ruined country, despoiled of two of its provinces by a foreign foe, condemned to pay an enormous subsidy in addition, and now the scene of an internal conflict the end of which no one could foresee.

While I was mousing among the old records of the Paris Observatory, the city was under the reign of the Commune and besieged by the national forces. The studies had to be made within hearing of the besieging guns; and I could sometimes go to a window and see flashes of artillery from one of the fortifications to the south.

Nearly every day I took a walk through the town, occasionally as far as the Arc de Triomphe. The story of the Commune has been so often written that I cannot hope to add anything to it, so far as the main course of events is concerned. Looking back on a sojourn at so interesting a period, one cannot but feel that a golden opportunity to make observations of historic value was lost. The fact is, however, that I was prevented from making such observations not only by my complete absorption in my work, but by the consideration that, being in what might be described as a semi-official capacity, I did not want to get into any difficulty that would have compromised the position of an official visitor. I should not deem what we saw worthy of special mention, were it not that it materially modifies the impressions commonly given by writers on the history of the Commune. What an historian says may be quite true, so far as it goes, and yet may be so far from the whole truth as to give the reader an incorrect impression of the actual course of events.

The violence and disease which prevail in the most civilized country in the world may be described in such terms as to give the impression of a barbarous community. The murder of the Archbishop of Paris and of the hostages show how desperate were the men who had seized power, yet the acts of these men const.i.tute but a small part of the history of Paris during that critical period.

What one writes at the time is free from the suspicion that may attach to statements not recorded till many years after the events to which they relate. The following extract from a letter which I wrote to a friend, the day after my arrival, may therefore be taken to show how things actually looked to a spectator:--

Dear Charlie,--Here we are, on this slumbering volcano.

Perhaps you will hear of the burst-up long before you get this. We have seen historic objects which fall not to the lot of every generation, the barricades of the Paris streets.

As we were walking out this morning, the pavement along one side of the street was torn up for some distance, and used to build a temporary fort. Said fort would be quite strong against musketry or the bayonet; but with heavy shot against it, I should think it would be far worse than nothing, for the flying stones would kill more than the b.a.l.l.s.

The streets are placarded at every turn with all sorts of inflammatory appeals, and general orders of the Comite Central or of the Commune. One of the first things I saw last night was a large placard beginning "Citoyens!"

Among the orders is one forbidding any one from placarding any orders of the Versailles government under the severest penalties; and another threatening with instant dismissal any official who shall recognize any order issuing from the said government.

I must do all hands the justice to say that they are all very well behaved. There is nothing like a mob anywhere, so far as I can find. I consulted my map this morning, right alongside the barricade and in full view of the builders, without being molested, and wife and I walked through the insurrectionary districts without being troubled or seeing the slightest symptoms of disturbance. The stores are all open, and every one seems to be buying and selling as usual.

In all the cafes I have seen, the habitues seem to be drinking their wine just as coolly as if they had nothing unusual on their minds.

From this date to that of our departure I saw nothing suggestive of violence within the limited range of my daily walks, which were mostly within the region including the Arc de Triomphe, the Hotel de Ville, and the observatory; the latter being about half a mile south of the Luxembourg. The nearest approach to a mob that I ever noticed was a drill of young recruits of the National Guard, or a crowd in the court of the Louvre being harangued by an orator.

With due allowance for the excitability of the French nature, the crowd was comparatively as peaceable as that which we may see surrounding a gospel wagon in one of our own cities. A drill-ground for the recruits happened to be selected opposite our first lodgings, beside the gates of the Luxembourg. This was so disagreeable that we were glad to accept an invitation from Delaunay to be his guests at the observatory, during the remainder of our stay. We had not been there long before the s.p.a.cious yard of the observatory was also used as a drill-ground; and yet later, two or three men were given _billets de logement_ upon the observatory; but I should not have known of the latter occurrence, had not Delaunay told me. I believe he bought the men off, much as one pays an organ-grinder to move on. In one of our walks we entered the barricade around the Hotel de Ville, and were beginning to make a close examination of a mitrailleuse, when a soldier (beg his pardon, _un citoyen membre de la Garde Nationale_) warned us away from the weapon. The densest crowd of Communists was along the Rue de Rivoli and in the region of the Colonne Vendome, where some of the princ.i.p.al barricades were being erected. But even here, not only were the stores open as usual, but the military were doing their work in the midst of piles of trinkets exposed for sale on the pavement by the shopwomen. The order to destroy the Column was issued before we left, but not executed until later. I have no reason to suppose that the shopwomen were any more concerned while the Column was being undermined than they were before. To complete the picture, not a policeman did we see in Paris; in fact, I was told that one of the first acts of the Commune had been to drive the police away, so that not one dared to show himself.

An interesting feature of the sad spectacle was the stream of proclamations poured forth by the Communist authorities. They comprised not only decrees, but sensational stories of victories over the Versailles troops, denunciations of the Versailles government, and even elaborate legal arguments, including a not intemperate discussion of the ethical question whether citizens who were not adherents of the Commune should be ent.i.tled to the right of suffrage.

The conclusion was that they should not. The lack of humor on the part of the authorities was shown by their commencing one of a rapid succession of battle stories with the words, "Citoyens! Vous avez soif de la verite!" The most amusing decree I noticed ran thus:--

"Article I. All conscription is abolished.

"Article II. No troops shall hereafter be allowed in Paris, except the National Guard.

"Article III. Every citizen is a member of the National Guard."

We were in daily expectation and hope of the capture of the city, little imagining by what scenes it would be accompanied. It did not seem to my unmilitary eye that two or three batteries of artillery could have any trouble in demolishing all the defenses, since a wall of paving-stones, four or five feet high, could hardly resist solid shot, or prove anything but a source of destruction to those behind it if attacked by artillery. But the capture was not so easy a matter as I had supposed.

We took leave of our friend and host on May 5, three weeks before the final catastrophe, of which he wrote me a graphic description.

As the barricades were stormed by MacMahon, the Communist line of retreat was through the region of the observatory. The walls of the building and of the yard were so ma.s.sive that the place was occupied as a fort by the retreating forces, so that the situation of the few non-combatants who remained was extremely critical.

They were exposed to the fire of their friends, the national troops, from without, while enraged men were threatening their lives within.

So hot was the fusillade that, going into the great dome after the battle, the astronomer could imagine all the constellations of the sky depicted by the bullet-holes. When retreat became inevitable, the Communists tried to set the building on fire, but did not succeed.

Then, in their desperation, arrangements were made for blowing it up; but the most violent man among them was killed by a providential bullet, as he was on the point of doing his work. The remainder fled, the place was speedily occupied by the national troops, and the observatory with its precious contents was saved.

The Academy of Sciences had met regularly through the entire Prussian siege. The legal quorum being three, this did not imply a large attendance. The reason humorously a.s.signed for this number was that, on opening a session, the presiding officer must say, _Messieurs, la seance est ouverte_, and he cannot say _Messieurs_ unless there are at least two to address. At the time of my visit a score of members were in the city. Among them were Elie de Beaumont, the geologist; Milne-Edwards, the zoologist; and Chevreul, the chemist.

I was surprised to learn that the latter was in his eighty-fifth year; he seemed a man of seventy or less, mentally and physically.

Yet we little thought that he would be the longest-lived man of equal eminence that our age has known. When he died, in 1889, he was nearly one hundred and three years old. Born in 1786, he had lived through the whole French Revolution, and was seven years old at the time of the Terror. His scientific activity, from beginning to end, extended over some eighty years. When I saw him, he was still very indignant at a bombardment of the Jardin des Plantes by the German besiegers.

He had made a formal statement of this outrage to the Academy of Sciences, in order that posterity might know what kind of men were besieging Paris. I suggested that the sh.e.l.ls might have fallen in the place by accident; but he maintained that it was not the case, and that the bombardment was intentional.

The most execrated man in the scientific circle at this time was Leverrier. He had left Paris before the Prussian siege began, and had not returned. Delaunay a.s.sured me that this was a wise precaution on his part; for had he ventured into the city he would have been mobbed, or the Communists would have killed him as soon as caught.

Just why the mob should have been so incensed against one whose life was spent in the serenest fields of astronomical science was not fully explained. The fact that he had been a senator, and was politically obnoxious, was looked on as an all-sufficient indictment.

Even members of the Academy could not suppress their detestation of him. Their language seemed not to have words that would fully express their sense of his despicable meanness, not to say turpitude.

Four years later I was again in Paris, and attended a meeting of the Academy of Sciences. In the course of the session a rustle of attention spread over the room, as all eyes were turned upon a member who was entering rather late. Looking toward the door, I saw a man of sixty, a decided blond, with light chestnut hair turning gray, slender form, shaven face, rather pale and thin, but very attractive, and extremely intellectual features. As he pa.s.sed to his seat hands were stretched out on all sides to greet him, and not until he sat down did the bustle caused by his entrance subside.

He was evidently a notable.

"Who is that?" I said to my neighbor.