Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/172

158 From the Southern Churchman:—

2em

Your letter revived pleasant remembrances. Your questions are themes. It would require volumes to contain the answers to them.

You ask about the "harmony of science and revelation," and wish to know if I find distinct traces in the Old Testament of scientific knowledge, and in the Bible any knowledge of the winds and ocean currents. Yes, knowledge the most correct and reliable.

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades? It is a curious fact, that the revelations of science have led astronomers of our own day to the discovery, that the sun is not the dead centre of motion around which comets sweep and planets whirl, but that it, with its splendid retinue of worlds and satellites, is revolving through space at the rate of millions of miles in a year, and in obedience to some influence situated precisely in the direction of the star Alcyon, one of the Pleiades. We do not know how far off in the immensities of space that centre of revolving cycles and epicycles may be, nor have our oldest observers or nicest instruments been able to tell us how far off in the skies that beautiful cluster of stars is hung "whose influences man can never bind." In this question alone, and the answer to it, are involved both the recognition and the exposition of the whole theory of gravitation.

Science taught that the world was round; but potentates pronounced the belief heretical, notwithstanding the Psalmist, while apostrophizing the works of creation in one of his sublime moods of inspiration, "when prophets spake as they were moved," had called the world "the round world," and "bade it rejoice."

You remember when Galileo was in prison a pump-maker came to him with his difficulties, because his pump would not lift water higher than thirty-two feet. The old philosopher thought it was because the atmosphere would