The herald., 1896-07-19

| may be said to open up with the Caperni-
| Gus theory Of the proper structure of the
! solar system. Heretofore it had been
! considered that the earth was the center
of not only the solar system but the en-
| tire universe. Capernicus showed this
| to be erroneous, and in 1543 published his
! elaborate work on the revolutions of the
! heavenly bodies. in which he clearly set
! forth that the sun was the center of the
! solar system and that the earth was only
! one of the brotherhood of planets mov-
! ing in orbits around him. Later on KEEP
| Ter showed that these orbits We're not
circles, as Capernicus had believed, but
that they were eclipses and that the sun
occupied one of the faci. This discovery
| Is known as Kepler's first law. To this
he soon added another discovery, that
| the roeden vectors Ohat is any imagn-
ary line drawn from the sun to the plane t
! in whatever part of the eclipse it might
| be) always described equal areas and at
| equal times. Kepler spent thirty years
/ of careful, painstaking, mathematical
/ research on the orbit of the planet Mars
/ in order to discover these two laws; and
! it required eight years more to work out
| what is known as his third law. VIZ
! that the squares of the periodic time of
| the planets in their orbits around the
| sun are proportional to the cubes of the
distance separating them from their
! common primary.
About this time great discovery was
made, which in the hands of few men
! of genius has done more for the advance
/ ment in astronomy than all others COM
bined This is the invention of the tel
! e9cope. Gallileo constructed telescope
/ { q himself which magnifled thirty times.
/ ON the night OF January l1th, 1910 he
| discovered the moons to the planet Ju-
! piter; later on he discovered the phases
1 on Venus, the mountains in the moon
! and the spots on the sun. Everybody
| knows the history of Gallileo and of the
; persecution which followed him relent-
! lessly from the irquisition until his death
occurred while a prisoner Of the inqui-
! sition in 1643, the very year Sir Isaac
! Newton was born. The causes of the
elliptical motions of the planets in their
orbits neither Capernicus nor Kepler
were able to account for. but Sir Isaac
! Newton was equal to the herculean task.
| The discovery of the universal gravita-
/ ton does undoubtedly constitute most
splendid monument to the intellectual
powers of the man. AS consequence
of universal gravitaton, it follows that
as every particle of matter attracts
every other particle of matter in the uni
| verse, great perturbation must result
| from the attraction of the planets on
| each other In 1912 it was observed that
the planet URANUS was disturbed in its
| orbit being attracted OutWarQly from
| the sun. hence none of the interior plan
! cts could cause the perturbation. What
| could it be but an unknown planet on
the other side of the universe attracting g
it away from the sun? Adams and Le-
verrier, two famous mathematicians,
Independent of each other, set forth to
discover this unknown body not with a
telescope, but by pure mathematical
computations. Both discovered the plan
ct unknown to each other, and their
names shall be handed down to poster
ty as the solvers of one of the hardest
problems that has ever attracted the at
tention of thinking men," The lecturer
at the close exposed to view number Of
very fine pictures of different planets,
| which were very interesting.
EVENING SESSION.
In the evening at o'clock, another
large audience gathered in the auditor
| iu1n to listen to the lecture of Rev. DR..
| Carlos Martyn the eminent lecturer on
| reform movements. The Devil in Poll
tics was the subject of his address. DR..
| Martyr is magnetic speaker and held
the audience in the closest attention
! during the entire lecture. Numerous in
cidents connected with his reformatory
work in Chicago, in which he was the
prime factor, were told with telling
effect, the audience frequently inter
rupting his remarks with applause. The
| main object of his work throughout tn,
United States is to awaken the profess