Viewing page 161 of 182

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

AN INTERESTING LECTURE.

Professor Wise on the Platform.

HIS SECOND PAPER.

The following synopsis of Prof. Wise's second lecture on aeronautics, at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, will be read with interest. These discourses seem more like the stories of romance than sober realities, but it may well be imagined how singular the sights must be to one looking through the deep chasms of broken cloud-fields, on the surface of the earth beneath. To listen to these adventures makes one feel a strong desire to experience a summer trip through cloud land.

He opened his lecture by saying:

The grandeur of the world is not appreciated by the many. A comparative few get on the summit of Mt. Washington, and fewer still on the Alps, and these are always impressed with the grandeur of the mountain view. The sights are no doubt of an imposing nature, as part and parcel of the world--the beauty of mountain scenery is always so. But the climax of grandeur comes when you look at the world as a planet--when you are isolated entirely from it, say two or three miles above its surface. There you may sing with the poet:

"Men was made, and for him built magnificent a world."

Dull must be a soul that could go up there and not be moved with exalted feelings for the majesty of an infinite power. Beauty and harmony sing together, and the law of order pervades the scene. Mountain scenery is rugged; planet scenery is picturesque and artistic; the world becomes a picture, painted by a master hand. You are always over the centre of this grand panorama--the perspective running out from a common centre. 

High up in the atmosphere with a balloon entirely clear of the solid earth you are in a position to contemplate and admire what you see excellent." It is so very different from the view of a solid standpoint, such as we enjoy from the mountain summit, that it becomes difficult to convey more than a feeble idea of the scene. When we look at the moon, we beheld that old fashioned face of the veteran representative all the time past, present and to come;; when we look at Mars we find the outlines of land and water, it is so supposed. When we look at Saturn we see him poised inside of an immense hoop like the wheel in the gyroscope, and this view is only varied by obliquity of position, as he moves about in his rotatory dynamical gambols. With Juptier we find the belt, and thus the ancients crowned him as the champion of the cosmologian ring, whom no one could encounter without running the risk of a knock down from his thunderbolts. Wheu we look at our dear old Alma Mater, as we float along in our AErial Castle we see things to a certainty in the outlines portrayed beneath. Nevertheless, had we to be governed by the appearance of this planet which we inhabit, as presented to us from a balloon view, we should never have taken it to be a round ball. It looks to the AEronaut as a eoLcavity[[?]], like a great bowl, as regular in its form as one turned out on wood-turner's lathe; and it matters not how the surface of the country beneath us, when we are up several miles and the inequalities seem only as lights and shadows in the picture.Mountain ranges, such as the Alleghenies, are presented to the eye as semicircular bands of green and yellow. Water-courses of considerable length run up hill--from the centre of the visible basin up along its sides. When 

clouds--the dome-shaped clouds, which always stand on a common level--then the c=water-courses seem to meander among and over these clouds; and if the science of optics did not come to our aid, we could not make any more out of the view than we can of the mountains of the moon, or the seas upon Mars. Sometimes you see a distant city away up above the highest margin of the bowl, and we see it upside down, in the mirage of the atmosphere, where you cannot see the real city below at all. It is the Spectre of the Brocken of a large scale. When we look down as we are sailing over fields of cloud, through the deep chasms of their openings, then we begin to think that the "Arabian Nights" are but weak inventions founded upon positive realities. Such is my text for this evening's discourse.

It is very difficult to reason correctly upon a first aerial voyage. The noise over a great city is very tumultuous at first, but as you rise higher it melts away into harmonious cadences, much like a AEolean harp. Ascending from the seaboard you perceive ships rising up out of the horizon as by magic. The convexity of the earth being eight inches to the mile, and this obstruction of view decreasing as the squalls of the distance soon obscure the view of a ship to one on the level of the sea, but to the eye up two or three miles it is visible a hundred miles off, when you are between the ship and the sun and the atmosphere pure from a recent rain. Mountain scenery also develops itself in that magical manner. You appear to be stationary in space, because the balloon seems motionless, and thus the mountain ridges  and intervening valleys spring up out of depth of the visible basin as by enchantment, and they always present themselves in semicircular bands of green and yellow. Sailing over the State of Maine, northeast of Bangor, I noticed beneath a succession of these beautiful bands of yellow and green, but seeing no habitation in my line of direction, I came down into what I supposed a delightful country, but soon found myself deluded into a desolate juniper bog, which cost me my balloon and a tramp of five hours through the quagmire before I reached the outskirts of the civilization near Old Town. 

Many romantic scenes are presented to the eye of the aeronaut. Sailing over the White Mountains I saw Lake Winipesseogee nestled in the mountain depths, and it looked like a fish pond on a gentleman's country seat, with tiny boats sailing over it. Further on I noticed in this mountain range the picture of an extinct volcano. Things upon the earth's surface are out-lined to the eye of the air-traveler that are not visible to the terrestrial traveler.

The earial traveler can truly exclaim, "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in all your philosophy. The Professor dwelt with much earnestness upon these impressive scenes, and recommended aerial voyages as calculated to bring out the soul of man to its fulness of veneration for the profound majesty of nature and its omnipotent creator. 

The audience received the lecture with marked attention. The Professor will deliver another lecture on this subject next Tuesday evening, at the Wagner Free Institute of Science.