The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-11-22
Celestial and Terrestrial PhsnOmenR.
Moral Eject Of Physical Forces.

from ne ~. Y. Herald
Vesuvius is once again pouring its torrent
of FIRE through the vineyards of Lachrymi
Christi, and threatening to engulf cities as it
did in the days when the world was first
divided between the thoughts Of julius Caesar
and those of Jesus Christ There is terror in
the valley of Mexico also, and the people are
filled with alarm at the threatened activity of
volcano long extinct, whose blaze was per
haps beacon to the adventurous Cortes and
portent to the falling empire of the Monte
zumas. News from the West Indies hints the
devastation of an earthquake in the island
memorable for its association with the name
of Columbus and as the first seat of Spanish
power in this hemisphere. From such difTe-
rent points on the earth's surface come the
evidences that there is perturbation within;
that the collision of the pent-up forces has for
the time destroyed the balance. Stimuli
taneously with these internal disturbances
dependent upon them by unknown
relation-we have also wonderful disturb
ances on the surface-storms in the air of
scarcely paralleled power, hurricanes that
have blown the sea completely over
great tracts of land. Beyond our atmosphere,
in open space-there are stormes in the. stars,
too-shoals Of nebulous matter have been
lately driving across the earth's orbit, re-
bounding from the elasticity of our atmos-
pherio armor, or masses of this matter con-
sumed by combustion resulting from the
contact, or from the heat generated by the
friction of their flight. In all the great divi-
sions of visible nature there is perturbation,
destruction of the common order, perhaps
arrangement of natural and planetary laws.
Yet it was long since wisely suggested that
our so-called discord might be harmony not
understood, " and this is a subject on which it
is hardly safe to say that what seems to us
arrangement is not order. In whatever phrase
science may state the relation between these
several wonders Of the universe-for it seems
difficult to believe that they are not related
one with another-it is doubtful whether the
phrases can do more than disguise ignorance.
When Moses said of somewhat similar wonders
that 'the spirit Of God moved upon the face
of the waters" he perhaps expressed the first
cause quite as satisfactorily as science can do
it even now.
Human observation has noted in every age
that there is an agreement between the great
perturbations in the physical world and those
revolutions, changes, upheavals of society,
those disturbances Of political and moral rela-
tions that are in common view regarded as
due either to human pride, passion, and ambi-
ton, or to the direct Interpolation Of a super
are associated in the oldest of human remem-
brances with the portent of some blazing comet;
and so following there is hardly an i'll worthy
the dignity of history but has had its attend
ing or preceding signal in the heavens. Men
readily associated these things in the ages
when faith was a governing principle-when it
was assumed that they saw God in all that
they could not otherwise explain and when
the physical wonder that came in the same
period was naturally taken as a warning of
some more strictly human event. But this is
an inquiring rather than a believing age; yet
we must still associate great stellar
atmospheric or terrestrial perturbation with
periods remarkable for human changes. We
associate them inevitably because they come
together as matter of fact; and then follows
the inquiry, Is the relation merely one of coin
cidence, or did the thinkers who CROPPED and
guessed in the early dawn of intellectual light
treason better than they knew 7" Doubtless
this inquiry is to be answered fully only when
further discovery shall exactly develop the
nature, power, and modes of actipn of that yet
comparatively unknown principle-electricity
II is a remarkable characteristic OF this prin-
ciple that it is at once cause and result of
the greatest operations in natnre, while no
more definite account can be given of varying
states of humanity, whether in respect to
health in the common sense or in respect to
intellectual status, than consists in the ale
CATION of varying electrical conditions. Is the
SiS nervoSd upon which our daily health, OPT
Mons. acts depend, electricity Many i'm
poltant experiments seem TO indicate that it is
nothing else, and that if it differs in certain
respects it differs only as its natural medium
of action does from those things that are the
usual media of electricity. Well, this power,
that so effectually determines for better or
worse our daily acts, is also the spirit of the
storm, and is generated and set free in perhaps
illimitable quantities by those great chemical
actions of nature of which the volcanoes, the
comets, the atmospheric storms are only signs
and symptoms. At the very time, then, that
the volcano and the comet are blazing in their
several ways, Infinite Power is setting free an
agent impalpable save in results, that, acting
through human brain and nerve, makes our
pestiences as well as our wars, and originates
the grand revolutions and changes that illumi-
nate human history.
In the present condition of the political and
moral world, we may see that the agreement is
still sustained between physical and human
phenomena. With volcanoes active in either
hemisphere, with earthquakes tumbling down
the towers of ancient cities, with the very
earth plunging through a stream of starry
ruin, we find human society undergoing in
nearly every climate greater changes than any
of which the records have been kept from
other ages. Europe is closing a great phase
in its history. Men are looking upon the last
days of that religious empire (the Papal
Church) which, seizing the falling sceptre of
the Caesars, established a more extensive, il
less material power, presided over the birth
of the modern civilization of law and ltera-
ture, and fostered and secured the growth and
development of that system which now pushes
it from its pride of place. Asia, slumbering