Part 12

Whose bright ruddy face, growing smaller every day, as it gradually moves away from us and the sun, is still distinctly visible, being above the horizon from 2:19 p. m., on the 1st, to 5:11 a. m., on the 2nd; from 1:21 p. m., on the 15th, to 4:11 a. m., on the 16th; and from 12:30 p. m. on the 31st, to 3:12 a. m. on April 1st. During the month its diameter decreases from 13.2′ to 10″. Up to the 12th, its motion is retrograde 56′ 36.6″. From that date to the end of the month, its motion is 1° 59′ 6.3″ direct. On the 12th it is stationary; or, at least, appears so. On the 22nd, it reaches its farthest point from the sun. It had often been surmised that Mars had a satellite; but it was not until after the 11th of August, 1877, that this supposition gave place to certainty. On the night of the date mentioned, Professor Asaph Hall discovered, a little east of the planet, a small object, which proved on further investigation to be a small body making a revolution in about twenty-nine hours, or as afterward appeared, in thirty hours eighteen minutes. Soon after was seen still closer to Mars an object which proved to be another satellite making a revolution about its primary in seven hours and thirty-nine minutes. These satellites not only make their revolutions in the shortest time, but are the least known heavenly bodies; the diameter of the outer one being estimated by Professor Newcomb at from five to twenty miles, and that of the inner at from ten to forty miles, the entire surface being little if any larger than the “ranches” of some of our western “farmer,” or “cattle kings.”

Between Mars and Jupiter, there was in 1801 discovered a small planet to which was given the name Ceres; in 1802, another named Pallas; in 1804 another named Juno, and in 1807, another named Vesta. From 1807 to 1845, discovery in that region seemed to cease; but since 1845 not less than two hundred and twenty of these bodies have been found and named, and are now called by the general name

ASTEROIDS, OR PLANETOIDS.

Of these none, except perhaps occasionally Ceres and Vesta, can be seen by the unaided eye. This is on account of their small size, their diameters ranging from fifty to two hundred and twenty-eight miles. The theory respecting these bodies is that they are portions of a larger one that in some manner became disintegrated, and each part obeying the laws of gravitation, formed itself into a separate sphere.

JUPITER,

Like Mars, this month will decrease somewhat in brilliancy, his diameter diminishing in appearance from 41.6″ to 38″. On the 20th he will be stationary. Up to that date he will have a retrograde motion amounting to 34′ 5.85″; and from the 22nd to the end of the month a direct motion of 13′ 37.9″. On the 1st, he rises at 1:48 in the afternoon; sets next morning at 4:26; on the 15th, rises at 12:50 p. m., setting next morning at 3:50, and on the 31st rises at 11:48 a. m., setting at 2:58 a. m., April 1st. On the 7th, at 8:16 p. m., is 5° 54′ north of the moon.

SATURN,

Though still a prominent object in the evening in the west, is fast approaching a time when its beauties will be rendered invisible by a greater luminary. Only temporarily, however; for next year it will emerge and shine with increased splendor. For this month, on the 2nd, it sets at 12:38 a. m., and on the 15th, at 11:47 p. m.; and on the 31st, at 10:50 p. m. Its motion is direct, and amounts to 2° 16′ 58″. Diameter on 1st, 17.2″; on 31st, 16.4″. On 3rd, at 2:08 p. m., it will be 1° 42′ north of the moon; and on the 30th, at 11:57 p. m., 2° 4′ north of the moon.

URANUS,

On the 16th, places itself directly on the other side of the world from the sun; in other words is in “opposition” to, or 180° from, the sun. Its diameter remains constant during the month (3.8″). On the 1st, 15th, and 31st, it rises at 7:00, 6:02, and 5:38 p. m., respectively. It sets on the 2nd, 16th, and April 1st, at 7:14, 6:18, and 5:14 a. m., respectively.

NEPTUNE

Will be evening star during the month, setting at the following times: On the 1st, at 11:22 p. m.; on the 15th, at 10:29 p. m.; and on the 31st, at 9:28 p. m. Its motion is direct, and about 45′. Its diameter, 2.6″. On the 2nd, at 12:30 p. m., 27′ north of moon; on the 29th, at 9:06 p. m., 38′ north of moon, making, as does also Saturn, two conjunctions with the moon in one month. On the 27th, about 9 p. m., it will be in conjunction with and 3° 34′ south of Venus.

THE FIR TREE.

By LUELLA CLARK.

Hark, hark! What does the fir tree say? Standing still all night, all day— Never a moan from over his way. Green through all the winter’s gray— What does the steadfast fir tree say?

Creak, creak! Listen! “Be firm, be true. The winter’s frost and the summer’s dew Are all in God’s time, and all for you. Only live your life, and your duty do, And be brave, and strong, and steadfast, and true.”

* * * * *

There is a pride which belongs to every rightly-constituted mind, though it is scarcely to be called pride, but rather a proper estimate of self. It is, properly speaking, the elevation of mind which arises when we feel that we have mastered some noble idea and made it our own. Man is proud of the idea only so far as he feels that it has become part of himself.—_Von Humboldt._

ARDENT SPIRITS.

By B. W. RICHARDSON, M.D.

It is the business of science to take up the pint and a half of ardent spirit which, split up through fifteen pints, gives all the zest and consequence to the thirteen and a half pints of colored water.

Taking this ardent spirit into one of her crucibles or laboratories, Science compares it with other products on the shelves there, and soon she finds its niche in which it fits truly. On the shelf where it fits she has ranged a number of other spirits. There is chloroform, ether, sweet spirit of nitre, and some other fluids, very useful remedies in the hands of the physician. These, she sees, are the children of the spirit, are made, in fact, from it. On the same shelf she has another set of spirits; there is wood spirit, there is potato spirit, there is a substance which looks like spermaceti; and these she sees are all members of the same family, not children, this time, of the ardent spirit, but brothers or sisters, each one constructed from the same elements, in the same relative proportions and on the same type. Passionless, having no predilection for any one object in the universe except the truth, she writes down the ardent spirit as having its proper place in a group of chemical substances which are distinctly apart from other substances she knows of, on which men and animals live, and which are called by the name of foods or sustainers of life. She says all the members of the spirit family are, unless judiciously and even skilfully used, inimical to life. They produce drowsiness, sleep, death. In the hands of the skilful they may be safe as medicines; in the hands of the unskilful they are unsafe, they are poisons. To this rule there is not one exception amongst them. There can be no demur, no doubt now on this particular point; it may be a blow to poetry of passion; it may make the ancient and modern bacchanalian look foolish to tell him that wine is a chemical substance mixed and diluted with water, and that beer and spirits are all in the same category; but such is the fact. In computing the influence of wine, men have no longer to discuss anything more than the influence of a definite chemical compound, one of a family of chemical compounds called the alcohols—the second of a family group, differing in origin from the first of the series, which is got from wood, in that it is got from grain, and is called ethylic, or common alcohol, pure spirit of wine. But now the world turns properly to ask another question. Admitted all that is said, why, after all, should the practice of mankind in the use of this spirit be bad? Man is not guided solely by reason; passion may lead him sometimes, perchance, in the true path. Tell us then, O Science! why this ardent spirit may not still be drunken; why may it not be a part of the life of man?

To this question the answer of Science is straight and to the point. In the universe of life, she says, man forms but a fractional part. All the sea is full of life; all the woods are full of life; all the air is full of life; on the surface of the earth man possesses, as companions or as enemies, herds and herds of living forms. Of that visible life he forms but a minute speck, and beyond that visible life there is the world invisible to common view, with its myriads of forms unseen, which the most penetrating microscope has not reached. Again, there are other forms of life; plants innumerable, from gigantic Wellingtonias to lichens and mosses, and beneath these myriads more so infinitely minute that the microscope fails to reach them. This is all life, life which goes through its set phases in due form; grows in health and strength and beauty, every part of it, from highest to lowest living grade, without a shade of the use of this strong spirit. What evidence can be more conclusive that alcohol is not included in the scheme of life?

And yet, if you want more evidence, it is yours. You try man by himself. Every child of woman born, if he be not perverted, lives without alcohol, grows up without it; spends—and this is a vital point—spends the very happiest part of its life without it; gains its growing strength and vitality without it; feels no want for it. The course of its life is, at the most, on the average of the best lives, sixty years, of which the first fifteen, in other words, the first fourth, are the most dangerous; yet it goes through that fourth without the use of this agent. But if in the four stages of life it can go through the first and most critical stage without alcohol, why can not it traverse the remaining three? Is Nature so unwise in her doings, so capricious, so uncertain, that she withholds a giver of life from the helpless, and supplies it only to the helpful? Some men, forming whole nations, have never heard of it; some have heard of it and have abjured its use. In England and America, at this time, there are probably near upon six millions of persons who have abjured this agent. Do they fall or fail in value of life from the abjuration? The evidence, as we shall distinctly see by and by, is all the other way. There are, lastly, some who are forced to live without the use of this agent. Do they fall or die in consequence? There is not a single instance in illustration.

On all these points, Science, when she is questioned earnestly, and interpreted justly, is decisive and firm, and if you question her in yet another direction, she is not less certain. You ask her for a comparison of alcohol and of man, in respect to the structure of both, and her evidence is as the sun at noon in its clearness. She has taken the body of man to pieces; she has learned the composition of its every structure—skin, muscle, bone, viscera, brain, nervous cord, organs of sense! She knows of what these parts are formed, and she knows from whence the components came. She finds in the muscles fibrine; it came from the fibrine of flesh, or from the gluten or albumen of the plants on which the man had fed. She finds tendon and cartilage, and earthy matter of the skeleton; they were from the vegetable kingdom. She finds water in the body in such abundance that it makes up seven parts out of eight of the whole, and that she knows the source of readily enough. She finds iron, that she traces from the earth. She finds fat, and that she traces to sugar and starch. In short, she discovers, in whatever structure she searches, the origin of the structure. But as a natural presence, she finds no ardent spirit there in any part or fluid. Nothing made from spirit. Did she find either, she would say the body is diseased, and, it may be, was killed by that which is found.

Sometimes, in the bodies of men, she discovers the evidences of some conditions that are not natural. She compares these bodies with the bodies of other men, or with the bodies of inferior animals, as sheep and oxen, and finds that the unnatural appearances are peculiar to persons who have taken alcohol, and are indications of new structural changes which are not proper, and which she calls disease.

Thus, by two tests, Science tries the comparison between alcohol and man. She finds in the body no structure made from alcohol; she finds in the healthy body no alcohol; she finds in those who have taken alcohol changes of the structure, and those are changes of disease. By all these proofs she declares alcohol to be entirely alien to the structure of man. It does not build up the body; it undermines and destroys the building.

One step more. If you question Science on the comparison which exists between foods and alcohol, she gives you facts on every hand. She shows you a natural and all-sufficient and standard food—she calls it milk. She takes it to pieces; she says it is made up of caseine, for the construction of muscular and other active tissues; of sugar and fat, for supplying fuel to the body for the animal warmth; of salts for the earthy, and of water for the liquid parts. This is a perfect standard. Holds it any comparison with alcohol? Not a jot. The comparison is the same with all other natural foods.

Man, going forth to find food for his wants, discovers it in various substances, but only naturally, in precisely such substances, and in the same proportions of such substances as exist in the standard food on which he first fed. Alcohol, alien to the body of man, is alike alien to the natural food of man.

Some of you will perhaps ask: Is every use of food comprised in the building up of the body? Is not some food used as the fuel of the engine is used, not to produce material, but to generate heat and motion, to burn and to be burned? The answer is as your question suggests. Some food is burned in the body, and by that means the animal fire—the _calor vitalis_, or vital heat, of the ancients—is kept alive. Then, say you: May not alcohol burn? We take starch, we take sugar into the body, as foods, but there are no structure of starch and sugar, only some products derived from them which show that they have been burned. May not alcohol in like manner be burned and carried away in new form of construction of matter?

What says Science to this inquiry? Her answer is simple. To burn and produce no heat is improbable, if not impossible; and if probable or even possible, is unproductive of service for the purpose of sustaining the animal powers. Test, then, the animal body under the action of alcohol, and see your findings. Your findings shall prove that, under the most favorable conditions, the mean effect of the alcohol will be to reduce the animal temperature through the mass of the body. There will be a glow of warmth on the surface of the body. Truly! but that is cooling of the body. It is from an extra sheet of warm blood brought from the heart into weakened vessels of the surface, to give up its heat and leave the whole body chilled, with the products of combustion lessened, the nervous tone lowered, the muscular power reduced, the quickened heart jaded, the excited brain infirm, and the mind depressed and enfeebled. Alcohol, alien to the structure of man and to the food of man, is alike alien to living strength of man, and to the fires which maintain his life.

ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.

By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

V.—A METHODIST DON QUIXOTE.

The place of Lorenzo Dow in the American pulpit is peculiar. He might be called “The Great Disowned.” He passed his life a wandering, outcast preacher; did a great work alone, generally unacknowledged by any religious body; opposed by the societies and maligned by many of the clergy, whom he powerfully aided; and in death his name and work would have sunk into undeserved oblivion, but for his own writings in which, with prophetic instinct, he preserved the record of his own sacrifices and successes, and the scant recognition accorded them. He also recorded with impartial fidelity his own “fantastic tricks” and erratic independence, which furnish the only excuse for the treatment he received. He called himself a Methodist, and refused to work inside church lines. A zealous, even bigoted sectarian; he preached in open defiance of all denominational polity. He was a clerical bushwhacker.

The time in which Dow flourished was a remarkable one politically, commercially and religiously. It was the formative age of the Constitution and of the American Republic. It saw the creation of American commerce and the opening up of the continent to settlement. And it has been well called “the heroic age of American Methodism.”

As the sense of dependence on the mother country, and of subjection to royal authority wore off, the people began to grow rapidly in mental and moral stature. The population which had timidly hugged the Atlantic coast, as if afraid to lose sight of the British navy, now turned its eyes inland, its thoughts over the whole world. The pioneer spirit awoke. The “Northwest Territory” was organized for settlement; Louisiana and Florida were purchased and the great Mississippi basin was opened up. Indian nations were subdued and “city lots were staked for sale above old Indian graves.” A second war was fought with Great Britain, to drive her from our path of advance on land or sea. Settlers in a thousand directions ramified the wilderness with the nerves and arteries of civilization. The growth of men’s ideas was to correspond with expansion of territory—for “the spirit grows with its allotted spaces.” It became evident, even in the first generation of the Republic, that a new people had been raised up—almost as Roderick Dhu’s men sprang from the brake—to subjugate a continent and to create sovereign states out of the rudiments of empire which yet lay plastic and warm in the wilderness.

The spirit of unrest, of adventure, of expansion, seized all classes and occupations; and the pioneers of the Cross pressed into the wilderness side by side with the bearers of the ax and rifle.

Not the least remarkable feature of the evolution of this people was the deepening of the religious spirit. Wars, indeed, are generally followed by seasons of revival; but now the sobered thoughts of the American people seemed to increase as they receded from the war period, and realized the burdens of a new nationality, of self-government, and of continental subjugation which they had taken upon themselves. They had not only cut loose from the mother country, but had cut loose from all the ancient traditions of government and the experience of mankind. Responsibility brought seriousness; daily perils inclined men’s thoughts to hear whoever would discourse of eternal things. Thus the movement of the time at once prepared the way for the work of gospel spreading, and raised up strong men to do it.

One of the young men who was “set on fire of freedom” to this work was Lorenzo Dow. Never was more unpromising candidate for the ministry. He was eighteen years of age (1795), thin, angular, ungainly, eccentric in manner, illiterate, diffident, and, worst of all, an invalid, supposed to be a consumptive. No wonder the proposition of this sick, gawky boy to go upon circuit without any preparation met with opposition from his parents and brethren, was discouraged by those who dared not contradict his solemn protestations of an irresistible call, and was rejected by all the authorities of a church most liberal in its requirements of licentiates of any then extant.

“I do not believe God has called you to preach,” bluntly declared the minister in charge after having Dow try to preach, and seeing him faint dead away in the pulpit.

“Why?” demanded the weeping candidate.

“For five reasons.—(1) your health; (2) your gifts; (3) your grace; (4) your learning; (5) sobriety.”

“Enough, enough!” exclaimed the boy, aghast. “Lord, what _am_ I but a poor worm of the dust?”

Just the same, all this did not change his determination one whit. Nay, in a foot-note to this incident in his book he makes this finishing reference to his critic of this time with evident satisfaction: “He is since expelled the connection.”

Those who opposed him little knew of the reckless earnestness of his character—the trait which lay at the bottom of his whole remarkable career, and brought him success in spite of all his disabilities and all the external chances against him. He seemed to have accepted as his all-sufficient credentials the Lord’s charge to his disciples in the tenth chapter of Matthew; accepted it as literally and confidently as if it had been delivered specially to a sickly young convert in Connecticut about the close of the eighteenth century, instead of having been given to certain other illiterates in Judea eighteen centuries before. He always took the whole Bible literally, and acted and talked it in dead earnest. So providing neither gold, silver, brass nor scrip in his purse, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor staff for his journey, he started to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” He stood not on the order of his going, but went at once. If any would receive him, well; if not, worse for them, as saith Matthew x:14. He asked no gifts nor collections; rejected most of that which was voluntarily offered—giving frequent offense thereby—taking only what would suffice for the day. Sleeping in woods and under fences was small privation to him, for he never slept in beds, any way; the floor or a bench was his choice, on account of the asthma, he said. He was used to long fasts, and would travel fifty miles and preach half a dozen times without food. Indeed, his defiance of all precautions against sickness, and reversal of all physical conditions gave him rather a grewsome reputation with the simple folk among whom the invalid exploited, and some were afraid to entertain him. What a saint he would have made in those good old times when asceticism, energy, fanaticism, piety and dirt were of the popular odor of sanctity! A modern Peter the Hermit on a crusade!

To talk and to walk were his chief functions, and he rarely intermitted either. At that time the qualifications of a circuit preacher were said to be covered by these points: “Is he converted; is he qualified to preach; has he a horse?” Lorenzo had no need of the last of these qualifications. He was the champion pedestrian of the day. He could out-travel the public conveyances and tire out any horse over such roads. He was known throughout the south as “the walking minister.” But through New England, New York and Canada his quaint figure, queer actions and rude and vehement exhortations soon got him the general sobriquet of “Crazy Dow.” We read in his journal:

“As I entered the meeting house, having an old borrowed great-coat on and two hats, the people were alarmed. Some laughed, some blushed, and the attention of all was excited. I spoke for two hours, giving them the inside and outside of Methodism. I besought God in public that something awful might happen in the neighborhood if nothing else would do to alarm the people. For this prayer many said I ought to be punished.”

Again:

“Here, too, it was soon reported I was crazy. I replied, people do not blame crazy ones for their behavior; last night I preached from the word of God, when I come again I will preach from the word of the devil. This tried our weak brethren.”