San Andreas independent., 1856-10-11
A way to Remember.

a tendency TO interfere With the memory
of the scientific facts or of the philosoph-
ical truths which, in the intervals of
leisure, they have been at pains to acquire.
Now, there are many everyday familiar
things which, by any one sincerely in
earnest, may be made powerful helps to
the memory, and to habits of reflection,
through the association of ideas. It NAV
be useful to illustrate this position by a
few examples.
There are few readers who have travelled
by any sort of carriage, who could have
failed to remark the appearances of mo-
tlon impressed upon the landscape
These are due, not to the landscape, but
to the carriage. Such simple phenomena
are easy of association with the motion of
the earth and the immobility of the sun !;
they read many lessons to us on the differ
ence between real ana apparent motion.
Among the highest truths in nature, is
the now confessed universally of motion.
The fixed stars are no longer fixed in the
ordinary sense, and the belief of thou
sands OF years that they were absolutely
fixed, is now proved to have arisen from
an illusion of the senses. All are now
conceded to be moving around each other
with marvellous velocity though, from the
distance, the motion appears to us to be
remarkably slow. The sun himself has
his circuit of travel, measured by ages
In the words of modern astronomer.
mutation and change are every where
found; all is in notion orbits expanding
or contracting, their planes rocking up or
down, their perihelia and nodes sweeping
In opposite directions round the sum-" It
is we'll that we are likewise told that I" the
limits of all these changes are fixed; that
these limits can never be passed, and that
at the end of vast period, amounting to
many millions of years, the entire range of
fuctuatlon will have been accomplished, the
entire system, planets, orbits, incinations,
eccentricities, perihelia, and nodes, will
have regained their original values and
places, and the great bell of eternity will
have then sounded Onep
Now among many things which we have
not mentioned, but which are nevertheless
involved In the above statement, there are
not few that are extremely difficult to be
remembered, but which it would be SER
viceable to retain in memory by the aid of
familiar associations. Recurring again to
the phenomena of travel (for earth is to
man none other than magnificent char
lot wherein he rides around that great central
luminary, the sun In the midst of plane
tary systems without end, we may again
refer the apparent motion of the OBJ
jects through which the passenger on the
railway progresses. While passing in a
direct line through forest of trees, those
trees toward which he is moving will ap-
pear to open out or separate from each
other, while those left behind will appear
to close up. Now this same opening out,
and this same closing up, are actually the
criteria, employed to determine the astron-
omer touching the direction in which man
on this earth is travelling through the
starry forrest in the skies. Borne along
by the movement of the sun, the astrono-
mer accordingly seeks point in the
heavens where the stars appear to be in
creasing their mutual distances. Finding
this point, he next looks behind him in
the opposite direction, and there perceving
the stars to close up on each other, he
concludes that he has found the direction
in which he is moving In this manner
it was, in fact, that Herschel determined
that the solar system is travelling through
space toward point il the constellation
Hercules. Now, many minds acting on
this simple association, like the actor who
receives the cue of word or two from the
prompter and then remembers his whole
part, may, from the mere force of such a
system, remember the whole of the dis
coveries of Argelandes and Maedler.-
The sun, with it's planets, will be seen
sweeping toward the north pole of the
heavens-in fact, toward the star marked
t in the constellation Hercules-with a
velocity which causes it to pass over dis
tance equal to thirty-three millions three
hundred and fifty thousand miles every
year. The star, Alcyone, will be recalled
as the principal star in the group of the
Pleiades, now supposed to occupy the
centre of gravity, and to be at present the
sun about which the universe of stars
composing our astral system are all revolv-
ing; the light from Alcyone requiring
period of FIVE hundred and thirty seven
years to traverse the distance Of the sun,
from the central orb about which he per-
forms his mighty revolution; and the
enormous term of eighteen million two
hundred thousand years being required to
De accomplished, if We may rely on the
angular motion of the sun and system, as
already determined, before the solar orb,
with all its planets, satellites, and comets
Will have completed one revolution around
Its grand centre.
Still keeping to the incidents of travel,
ana the phenomenon of forest trees
Nv lQ hos ohr i