The Great Lick Telescope.
WHEN America proudly mounts her "Lick telescope" upon the California mountain, what, it will be asked, will this new and costly armament of astronomy effect? The best way to answer is by taking the case of the moon. Cynthia, the pale sister and companion of this globe, is distant from us about 240,000 miles, not much more than nine times the circumference of the earth. If all goes well with the great glasses; if the Lick telescope comes up to expectation in definition and magnifying force, the moon will be brought as near to the observer's eye as if it floated only 100 miles away from us in space. Already we can discern upon her surface with existing "opticks" any object not smaller than St. Paul's Cathedral, but this would make manifest every item upon the face of the silvery sphere, down to the size of the dome of the cathedral. We should still be far short of seeing the people of the moon, if any exist; but were the orb really inhabited, and did its population traverse the peaks and craters of the sphere in large bodies, or by some contrivances resembling our ships or railway trains, their movements ought to become observable. Too much, indeed, must not be expected even from so wonderful an addition to the powers of the astronomer; and it is astonishing to note how very much more has been done for the science of the heavens by the naked eye than with optical instruments. Heis accomplished all his admirable researches, his celestial atlasses and catalogues, his charts of the shooting stars and of the zodiacal light, without once setting his eye to a telescope. All the discoveries of ancient astronomers were of course effected without the aid of glasses, and Pliny, in his Ninth Book of the "Almagest," quotes fourteen observations of Mercury, dating two or three hundred years before our era, and still to be relied on. They had, no doubt, good eyes in those days, when everybody except the astrologers went to bed with the sun, and rose as soon as he appeared. In the tail of Ursa Major, the middle star has near it a small companion styled on the celestial charts "Alcor." The Arab observers knew this by the name of "Saidak," which means "touchstone" or "trial;" for, if a man could perceive that tiny point with the unassisted eye, he could easily see the smaller stars of the Pleiades and the satellites of Jupiter. We must, however, also remember the purity and transparency of the Eastern sky, especially in dry, desert regions, where all heavenly orbs shine with a brilliancy quite unknown to western astronomers. Copernicus, it is related, lamented in the hour of his death that he had never so much as seen the planet Mercury, which the happier Greek observers called "Stilbon," the "splendidly shining;" and one of the most promising points in connection with this great new telescope in America is that it will be perched upon a mountain peak, far above the dust and mists of the lower world—lifted into that stainlessly dark-blue atmosphere which Professor Tyndall has celebrated upon his high Alps. Accordingly when we call to mind the considerable additions made to the heavenly science by such comparatively inferior instruments as even those of Lord Rosse, Mr. Lassell, and the elder Herschel, we may be full of hope that the Californian astronomers will astonish and delight the Old World with new discoveries, "when some new planet swims into their ken." There are unresolved nebulae at which the great glass will no sooner be pointed than we may expect to have those distant mysteries instantly "come down" into galaxies of stars and systems; and outside Uranus and Neptune, the latter being distant from us 2,743,000,000 miles, the new telescope may cast a glance into the border-world between our farthest planet and our nearest star, and perhaps find a sister for the single moon of Neptune, and tell us why the four moons of Uranus—Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon—dance backward in the eternal minuet of the skies, and have planes perpendicular to the ecliptic of the mother-body. There are, indeed, endless points upon which astronomers seek such information as improved command of the heavens might supply, especially if the enhanced powers of this telescope can be wedded to the faithful eyesight of the photographic camera. Wonderful things have been achieved of late in such a way; spaces of the midnight sky, blank to the ordinary lens or mirror, have revealed to the sensitive film of the plate myriads of starry bodies. The crimson cressets on the sun's ridge have depicted themselves; his spots have registered their periodic passage, and the time approaches apparently when an automatic astronomer will be invented which will chronicle every event of the spheres with sleepless accuracy. We want to know much more of comets, of nebulae, and of those curious little members of our system, the planetoids, which perpetually increase in number with closer observation, until they have grown up during the present century to more than 250 known and named bodies. They wander as obedient to law as the very largest planets, between Mars and Jupiter, tiny islets of the sapphire ocean, small children of the cosmos, the biggest not much more than 300 miles in diameter, few of them so bulky as to be visible without a telescope. Are these little silver bees of the system mere broken fragments of some intermediate planet, or have they been seriously created, and have they taken up with revolution and gravitation, and all the rest of it, on their own account and for special purposes? To answer that and many another question of the kind may doubtless, in American phrase, "lick the Lick glass."—London Telegraph.