Page:World of Wonders, The (1873?, Cassell, Petler, and Galpin).djvu/17



HE wise man only wonders once in his life, but that is always: the fool never. The education of the wise man begins with wonder, and ends with devout admiration; but the fool "doth not consider," and shuts his eyes to things around him. Strictly speaking, wonder is not a vulgar nor a foolish attribute.

"All wonder," said a dogmatic writer, "is but the effect of novelty upon ignorance." Nay, we answer, you cannot be ignorant if you would feel the greatest effect of wonder. Thus it is that Coleridge, the most encyclopedic of men, declares, "In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends, and admiration fills the interspace; but if the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration."

It is to excite this latter kind of wonder, and to teach, while informing, the first, that this work is written. While relating, so far as our space will permit us, all that is most wonderful in history and philosophy and the marvels of science, the wonders of animal life revealed by the glass of the optician or the labours of the chemist, we shall intersperse our narrative with relations of Siege and Battle, Perils of Sea and Land, of the Dreams and Fancies, the Ambition, the Wisdom and the Folly of Man, so as to avoid in every possible way the charge of dulness; for the effect of wonder too often repeated in the same circle, is to deaden the mental energy instead of wisely and freshly exciting it. Carefully interspersed with that which is scientific, in our pages will be found, it is hoped, subjects of vivid interest. And truly our scope is so wide that it will be hardly possible to fail.

Let us consider shortly one of the commonest wonders about us—. Gaze up into the sky from off the page you are reading, and try to pierce as far as your eye can reach, and then as far as your mind can conceive. Our globe—the speck of dust on which we stand—is 8,000 miles in diameter, or 24,000 in circumference; but with its sun, planets, and satellites, and those "less intelligible orbs called comets," it occupies space, which, calculated only by the uttermost bound of the orbit of Uranus—and we know that beyond Uranus there are worlds—is not less than three thousand six hundred millions of miles in diameter. The mind, it has well been said, fails to comprehend so vast an area. "Some faint idea of this," says an eloquent writer, "can be obtained from the fact that, if the swiftest racehorse ever known had begun to traverse it at full speed at