Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/486

468 for years Mr. Youmans was entitled to no small commendation for his capable work; but, more than all, to greater credit for the good he has accomplished in this series than has ever been tendered him.

In the present work we have one of these inimitable special brochures, which appeals to a small circle of readers, but it proves none the less interesting for the general reader. The author begins with the history of the aurora borealis—so called in contradistinction to the aurora australis of the south pole—and cites mentions of it by Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny the naturalist, Seneca, and Gregory of Tours. It is shown by these writers to have been an object of superstitious



dread and terror, even down to the seventeenth century, no one being capable of understanding the nocturnal miracle then. For that matter, only the educated few understand it now. But it is no longer a dragon, a harbinger of woe, a pet terror for homilists and prophets, the Valkyrie of the Norse Eddas, nor a reflection of fire that surrounds the north pole or emanates from a polar cavity or from the interior of the earth at that point—which Nansen possibly just escaped, and Andrée is probably now experiencing! One Danish writer, who called it "the King's Mirror," and wrote a work with that title in 1250, thought the aurora was "produced by the ice which radiates at night the light which it has absorbed by day." Since 1621 it has been called aurora borealis by scientists, or in popular parlance "the northern lights" or "streamers." It is