Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts
and their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way
was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,
which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific
gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure--by the
natural processes of animal decay--of the phosphorus contained in them.
This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His
own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;
and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that
the locusts do like that in Egypt.
Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's important
contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined to regard
it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he pronounced
against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was a
detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in 'suspenso
suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join
their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards
burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that
the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
because God "wanted to hev it so," the admirable idea fell perfectly
flat.
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