The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1876-01-15
THE PACIFIC
Commercial AOOtrtlsrr.
III tNH1 III IENE u
THE GROWTH OF WORLDS.
TIE NEBTLGUS BECINNING--THE Ii PLACE
Theory. Hew the Weight OF the World i in
ereased--The Lecturers Belief in aa IHfRite
Being.
From the Nsw YORK Ttm,,j

ereased--The Lecturers Belief in an IHfnIte
Being.
From me Nsg York Time,J
Mr. Proctor lectured last evening at Steinway
Hail on the e Birth and Growth Of Worlds
The house was packed from the platforms edge
70 the highest gallery, and az least one-half the
audience were ladies. Upon entering he bowed
in acknowledgment Of the hearty welcome that
greeted him, and plunged at once into his sub
ject. He said From the time when men began
to think they also began to search into the origin
Of what they saw around them. Among the
first accounts that have reached US some are dis
tinguished by their poetry, Others by their pathos-
In one account the earth was spoken Of as round
and fat, the heavens spreading over 1t like a tent.
All at first was darkness; but God said, " Let
there be light" and there was light. The frma-
ment separated the heavens from the earth, and
the waters above in the clouds from the waters
below For they yet knew nothing Of the laws
Of rain, and imagined that it fell from a great
reservoir beyond the crystalline. Then vegeta-
ton appeared, then a sun and moon, and then
the starry hosts. Oh this account it is sufficient
to say that, whether the person who wrote it
knew anything of science or not, it was the ac-
cepted explanation for thousands of years. But
as science progressed and men reasoned from
analogy, they began to gee that this earth grew
by a sequence of law, as other things do. Nor
need science concern itself whether this sequence
Of law is or is not consistent with an Infinite ex-
istence. Science neither denies nor asserts it.
1t admits infnity of space, it admits infnity of
time, and is therefore not bound to deny infinite
purpose or infinite personality of will. Take,
once for all, ~infnity of space, people it with
infnity of matter, and the result unquestionably
is ininity Of evolution. But this does not ex-
clude the other. Let us have full faith, then,
that by examining the teachings of nature we
never can be deceived nor led astray. We can
therefore confidently work our way through them,
COMPLIANT that fhou mill navar foil a lilo ohOpf
Him.
THE FIRST THINGS FOUND IN NATURE.
The first things we find in nature are masses of
nebulous matter, shining with a faint light,
bearing the same relation to ether as clouds in
the sky do to the sky in which they float. Here
the room was darkened and the stereopticon was
brought into play. The first picture presented
was a view of the nebule in the constellation
Argo, shown as faint, flmy clouds. The lecturer
demonstrated the enOrmou size of these patches
of light in various illustrations taken from the
apparent size of the moons body, and then an
other slide was used showing the constellation
Argo, or the ship of the argonauts, and the
nebule, according to the full power of a large
telescope. Sir John Herschel has devoted much
Of his life to the examination of this subject, and
had presented to the scientific world thousands of
nebula, where, before his time, only a scant
hundred had been counted and observed. His
most interesting observations had been upon the
nebule in Orion there the slide of that c~onstella-
ton was brought into play,) and from the data
he obtained he was enabled to declare that this
light flmy matter was glowing gas, and that
changes were constantly going on in these aggre-
cations from the nebulOus substance gathering
itself up to centers. The theory of La Place,
founded upon these nebula, was that here were
worlds, or rather u%niverses, in process of fOrma-
ton, upon a scale SO vast that the mind could
hardly grasp the figures. 1t was computed that
the nebule in Orion would fill % 900 900 times
the whole space in the solar system. The partial
resolution of some of these nebul@, or rather
some of these supposed nebule, with clusters of
stars had shaken the confidence of some astrono-
mers in the world-creatiDg theory of La Place,
but even the great telescope of Lord Rose was
powerless upon thousands of them, which obstl-
nately refused to present but stretches of dim
light filling by many times the field of the in
strument. The great French astronomer had
laid down the hypothesis that
A GRADUAL CONTRACTION TOOK PLACE
Around a central point, and that from the out
side bands of matter were thrown off, and that
these contracted into planetary bodies, which, in
obedience to the laws of grayitati0n, commenced
to revolve around the central mass. This was
inevitably of immense size as compared with the
nebulous rings from which the planetary bodies
were developed. AS far as the central accumula-
ton was concerned, the telescope showed that
this view was accurate, but the lecturer doubted
if the moving force was contraction. But that
there was a gathering impulse toward centers
was most uDuOQDIeQ, LOT the OBSERVATIONS OF St.
John Herschel had proved this. Here a slide
was introduced, showing the field broken up into
squares, in each of which were nebulous masses
Of various shapes, but the gradual Frightening
tendency toward the center was very marked.
Other slides were then used, showing the magni-
fcent spiral nebul@ called after Lord Rose, and
others in the Shield of Sobeiski and the Hair of
Berenice. These were shown as magnificent ex-
amples of spiral form in nebulous masses. An
other side showed a nebula which was at first
sight a strong complication of the La Place
theory, for it presented a great central body of
superior brightness, a duly outer ring. But
this, Mr.. Proctor remarked, under superior tel
escopic power showed also spiral forms. He
showed this as an argument in favor of his own
hypothesis, and that worlds were created not by
contracting inward, but by accretion outward.
The next slide showed what the spectroscope
could tell Of the composition Of the nebule. The
spectrum of a star, he said, was tinted with all
the colors of the rainbow, but crossed with dark
lines. The colors showed that the light was
produced by the vap0rs of incandescent metals
and gases analogous to our own sun, and the dark
lines were probably produced by cold vapors be-
tween the stars surface and our earth. But the
spectrum Of q nebula only showed fragmentary
lines of the spectra of gases, hydrogen being
prominent. From this one might conclude that
these substances which had been considered ele-
mentary were not so in fact, but were compound,
and that the glowing gases whose light appeared
in nebulous clouds were still more elementary
than our oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. 1t was
TO be observed that in another science, that of
chemistry, from other data absolutely dissimilar,
the foremost thinkers had advanced the same
idea. There was such an lnfnitude of variety in
nature that it would be 4 grieyous error to ina
CINE that the universes, now in process of forma-
ton from those masses Of glowing gas, were like
our own. 1t might well be that the compounds
which we called elementary gases would never be
formed there, but that other combinations would