The Hawaiian star. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu]) 1893-1912, 1909-10-09


stars in their courses long before the
beginning of that great chapter of
history which opens with the words
There was a man in the land of w."
the childhood simplicity of "once upon
a time" record. Slow centuries had
recast the Chaldean knowledge had
rearranged the Babylonian numerals,
had slowly vradAcated the error of es-
tablishingf the earth as the centre OF
the universe.
Only recently had it become known
that the sun was the centre of plan
etary orbits. But the fact still re-
manned that astronomy rested on its
Chaldean base. 1t was HALEY who
first saw that system of planets was
but an atom in space, who saw that
from outer space of an unmeasured
universe wandering bodies might be
caught within the influence of a sun
and its ringing planets and become a
member, however eccentric, of our sys-
TEN.
What manner of man was it who
could pass from planetary, and there
fore measurable, space to the ilimit-
able ether?
Captain in the Royal Navy with half
pay for life, fellow and secretary of
the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal,
all this he made himself. No one could
well have begun more remote from
prospects of such rewards of a high
career for Edmund Haley at his birth
in 1856 was the son of a soap boiler in
a shabby London suburb. From the
rancid reuse of kitchen fat and the
reek Of I'VE the lad was rescued by
Dean Colets noble charity. He wore
the fish of ST. Paul's School and was
sent Oh scholarship to Oxford when
ne was g.
The future great astronomer did no,
make his studies in the home OF
mathematics on the Cam, but was sent
to the great schools of classical litera-
ture on the Isis Yet three years later
youth of 20, he published a treatise
on the planetary orbits and argued the
suns aXial rotation. This because he
had it in him TO rise above his scholas-
tic condition just as in yet earlier years
it was in him to rise beyond the soap
watts of his home.
Thenceonward the record of his
years is tale of achievement. In
1898 he was appointed to the command
of Kings ship for a cruise in the
Pacific, the first of the long line of
voyages of scientific discovery under
taken as duty of great nations. His
crew mutinied and forced him home.
The next year he made second S art
and won success. His chart of mag
netic variation on the great ocean
masses remains the basis of this fea-
ture of modern charts and will scarce
ly be dislodeed by the work Of recon-
putation of these elements now in pro
gress. Oxford called h m in 1903 to
the Savilian chair of geometry, in 171S
he succeeded Sir Hans : oaue as secre-
tary of the Royal Society, in 1921 he
was the unanimous choice TO follow
Flamsteed as Astronomer Rrya'.
TO the older astronomy comets had
been a mystery for which centuries had
shown no solution. They had sWurg
into the heavens and out again. ami
not even the periodicity OF some of
them had been seen. No matter how
poor the science of any eroch of man
kind it mas seen little clta e, than
the ignorant and unthinking mass of
humanity. If science had been forced
to confess its inability to find a Nv
for these celestial visitors. had aca-
nowledged its ignorance of wha1 they
were, it is small wonder that the un-
learned, deifying ignorance after the
manner of those who cannot know,
ound the pleasudes of terror in re-
garding the stars with the bazing
trail of conflagration as a Wis tat on
of Providence, the sign of a wrath
which neither man nor the earth on
which he lives might avoid
From the earliest ines and through
the Middle Ages the people feared this
comet. Pestilence followed, they be-
lieved, in its train. The public enemy
and that for long ages was the Turk,
Continued on page fifteen)