Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/288

284 call atoms; whether, in other regions of the universe, other fortuitous meetings had not engendered edifices entirely different. Now we know that this is not so, that the laws of our chemistry are the general laws of nature, and that they owe nothing to the chance which caused us to be born on the earth.

But, it will be said, astronomy has given to the other sciences all it can give them, and now that the heavens have procured for us the instruments which enable us to study terrestrial nature, they could without danger veil themselves forever. After what we have just said, is there still need to answer this objection? One could have reasoned the same in Ptolemy's time; then also men thought they knew everything, and they still had almost everything to learn.

The stars are majestic laboratories, gigantic crucibles, such as no chemist could dream. There reign temperatures impossible for us to realize. Their only defect is being a little far away; but the telescope will soon bring them near to us, and then we shall see how matter acts there. What good fortune for the physicist and the chemist!

Matter will there exhibit itself to us under a thousand different states, from those rarefied gases which seem to form the nebula and which are luminous with I know not what glimmering of mysterious origin, even to the incandescent stars and to the planets so near and yet so different.

Perchance even, the stars will some day teach us something about life; that seems an insensate dream and I do not at all see how it can be realized; but, a hundred years ago, would not the chemistry of the stars have also appeared a mad dream?

But limiting our views to horizons less distant, there still will remain to us promises less contingent and yet sufficiently seductive. If the past has given us much, we may rest assured that the future will give us still more.

After all, it could scarce be believed how useful belief in astrology has been to humanity. If Kepler and Tycho Brahe made a living, it was because they sold to naive kings predictions founded on the conjunctions of the stars. If these princes had not been so credulous, we should perhaps continue to believe that nature obeys caprice, and we should still wallow in ignorance.