the balance, in serene air, of the warm air under the cold, in
which the warm air is at once compressed by weight, and expanded by
heat, and the cold air is thinned by its elevation, yet contracted
by its cold. There is indeed no possibility of embracing the
conditions in a single sentence, any more than in a single thought.
But the practical balance is effected in calm air, so that its
lower strata have no tendency to rise, like the air in a fire
balloon, nor its higher strata to fall, unless they congeal into
rain or snow.
I believe it will be an extreme benefit to my younger readers if I
write for them a little 'Grammar of Ice and Air,' collecting the
known facts on all these matters, and I am much minded to put by my
ecclesiastical history for a while, in order to relate what is
legible of the history of the visible Heaven.
[Footnote A: I trust that Dr. Rae will forgive my making the reader
better aware of the real value of this communication by allowing
him to see also the following passage from the kind private letter
by which it was supplemented:--
"Many years in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, I and my men
became educated for Arctic work, in which I was five different
times employed, in two of which expeditions we lived wholly by our
own hunting and fishing for twelve months, once in a stone house
(very disagreeable), and another winter in a snow hut (better),
_without fire of any kind to warm us_. On the first of these
expeditions, 1846-7, my little party, there being no officer but
myself, surveyed seven hundred miles of coast of Arctic America by
a sledge journey, which Parry, Ross, Bach, and Lyon had failed to
accomplish, costing the country about £70,000 or £80,000 at the
lowest computation. The total expense of my little party, including
my own pay, was under fourteen hundred pounds sterling.
"My Arctic work has been recognized by the award of the founder's
gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (before the completion
of the whole of it)."]]
[Footnote 18: 'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering on
its own account.'--I am under correction in this statement by the
Lucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules of
bodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more natural
than to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferous
ether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules of
sensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, _swinging
on their own account_, produce vibrations in the luminous ether,
and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of these
vibrations depend upon the periods in which the molecules are
_disposed to swing_." ('On the Changes of Refrangibility of Light,'
p. 549.)
It seems to me a pleasant conclusion, this, of recent science, and
suggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there be
light' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there be
a disposition of the molecules to swing,' and the destinies of
mankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, depend
thereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at all
events not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition!
Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so high
mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word
'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous
arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the
oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which
the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of the
body?
It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as the
writer in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affect
the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental
defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although
the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised)
"command of language"--of never allowing a sentence to pass proof
in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a
better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly
intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely
useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will
write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad
English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author
says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is
able properly to say _any_thing,--and secondly, whether his conceit
permits him to say anything properly.
Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of
the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his
workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a
man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative
statement that he rejoices _as_ a strong man to run his course, is
one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting.
And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in
that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's
workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the
stove's workmanship,--and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who
are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and
fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own
coal-scuttles.
Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the
'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see
presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the
present world is concerned,--by clothing in a "properly scientific
garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference
between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for
the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something
which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle
stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can
penetrate through oak-wood or through water--or (alas! that it
should be so often tried) through the human body; and _this power
of penetration_" (italics now mine) "_is the distinguishing
characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity_. Let
us define by the term 'Energy,' this power which the rifle ball
possesses of overcoming obstacles, or of doing work."
Now, had Mr. Stewart been a better scholar, he would have felt,
even if he had not known, that the Greek word 'energy' could only
be applied to the living--and of living, with perfect propriety
only to the _mental_, action of animals, and that it could no more
be applied as a 'scientific garb,' to the flight of a rifle ball,
than to the fall of a dead body. And, if he had attained thus much,
even of the science of language, it is just possible that the small
forte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have been
energized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertly
moving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world,
is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights and
velocities; that the effect of their impact depends--not merely on
their pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms and
stability of the substances they encounter, and that there is no
more quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in the
swiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in the
deliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat's
proboscis, or a seamstress' needle.
Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, do
not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,--for a bad
writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into
one,--but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea
admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that
of a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because
these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep
the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier
motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant
quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial
erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo the
damage.]
[Footnote 19: 'Force and pace.'--Among the nearer questions which
the careless terminology on which I have dwelt in the above note
has left unsettled, I believe the reader will be surprised, as much
as I am myself, to find that of the mode of impulse in a common
gust of wind! Whence is its strength communicated to it, and how
gathered in it? and what is the difference of manner in the impulse
between compressible gas and incompressible fluid? For instance:
The water at the head of a weir is passing every instant from
slower into quicker motion; but (until broken in the air) the fast
flowing water is just as dense as the slowly flowing water. But a
fan alternately compresses and rarefies the air between it and the
cheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of wind
means a momentary increase in velocity and density of which I
cannot myself in the least explain,--and find in no book on
dynamics explained,--the mechanical causation.
The following letter, from a friend whose observations on natural
history for the last seven or eight years have been consistently
valuable and instructive to me, will be found, with that subjoined
in the note, in various ways interesting; but especially in its
notice of the inefficiency of ordinary instrumental registry in
such matters:--
"6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON, _Feb. 8th, 1884_.
DEAR MR. RUSKIN,--Some time since I troubled you with a note or two
about sea-birds, etc.... but perhaps I should never have ventured
to trouble you again, had not your lecture on the 'Storm Clouds'
touched a subject which has deeply interested me for years past. I
had, of course, no idea that you had noticed this thing, though I
might have known that, living the life you do, you must have done
so. As for me, it has been a source of perplexity for years: so
much so, that I began to wonder at times whether I was not under
some mental delusion about it, until the strange theatrical
displays, of the last few months, for which I was more or less
prepared, led so many to use their eyes, unmuzzled by brass or
glass, for a time. I know you do not bother, or care much to read
newspapers, but I have taken the liberty of cutting out and
sending a letter of mine, sent on the 1st January to an evening
paper,[A] upon this subject, thinking you might like to know that
one person, at any rate, has seen that strange, bleared look about
the sun, shining so seldom except through a ghastly glare of pale,
persistent haze. May it be that the singular coloring of the
sunsets marks an end of this long period of plague-cloud, and that
in them we have promise of steadier weather? (No: those sunsets
were entirely distinct phenomena, and promised, if anything, only
evil.--R.)
I was glad to see that in your lecture you gave the dependants upon
the instrument-makers a warning. On the 26th I had a heavy
sailing-boat lifted and blown, from where she lay hauled up, a
distance of four feet, which, as the boat has four hundred-weight
of iron upon her keel, gives a wind-gust, or force, not easily
measured by instruments.
Believe me, dear Mr. Ruskin,
Yours sincerely,
ROBT. C. LESLIE."
I am especially delighted, in this letter, by my friend's
vigorously accurate expression, eyes "unmuzzled by brass or glass."
I have had occasion continually, in my art-lectures, to dwell on
the great law of human perception and power, that the beauty which
is good for us is prepared for the natural focus of the sight, and
the sounds which are delightful to us for the natural power of the
nerves of the ear; and the art which is admirable in us, is the
exercise of our own bodily powers, and not carving by sand-blast,
nor oratorizing through a speaking trumpet, nor dancing with spring
heels. But more recently, I have become convinced that even in
matters of science, although every added mechanical power has its
proper use and sphere, yet the things which are vital to our
happiness and prosperity can only be known by the rational use and
subtle skill of our natural powers. We may trust the instrument
with the prophecy of storm, or registry of rainfall; but the
conditions of atmospheric change, on which depend the health of
animals and fruitfulness of seeds, can only be discerned by the eye
and the bodily sense.
Take, for simplest and nearest example, this question of the stress
of wind. It is not the actual _power_ that is immeasurable, if only
it would stand to be measured! Instruments could easily now be
invented which would register not only a blast that could lift a
sailing boat, but one that would sink a ship of the line. But,
lucklessly--the blast won't pose to the instrument! nor can the
instrument be adjusted to the blast. In the gale of which my friend
speaks in his next letter, 26th January, a gust came down the hill
above Coniston village upon two old oaks, which were well rooted in
the slate rock, and some fifty or sixty feet high--the one, some
twenty yards below the other. The blast tore the highest out of the
ground, peeling its roots from the rock as one peels an
orange--swept the head of the lower tree away with it in one ruin,
and snapped the two leader branches of the upper one over the
other's stump, as one would break one's cane over some people's
heads, if one got the chance. In wind action of this kind the
amount of actual force used is the least part of the business;--it
is the suddenness of its concentration, and the lifting and
twisting strength, as of a wrestler, which make the blast fatal;
none of which elements of storm-power can be recognized by
mechanical tests. In my friend's next letter, however, he gives us
some evidence of the _consistent_ strength of this same gale, and
of the electric conditions which attended it:--the prefatory notice
of his pet bird I had meant for 'Love's Meinie,' but it will help
us through the grimness of our studies here.
"_March 3d, 1884._
My small blackheaded gull Jack is still flourishing, and the time
is coming when I look for that singularly sudden change in the
plumage of his head which took place last March. I have asked all
my ocean-going friends to note whether these little birds are not
the gulls _par excellence_ of the sea; and so far all I have heard
from them confirms this. It seems almost incredible; but my son, a
sailor, who met that hurricane of the 26th of January, writes to me
to say that out in the Bay of Biscay on the morning after the gale,
'though it was blowing like blazes, I observed some little gulls of
Jacky's species, and they followed us half way across the Bay,
seeming to find shelter under the lee of our ship. Some alighted
now and then, and rested upon the water as if tired.' When one
considers that these birds must have been at sea all that night
somewhere, it gives one a great idea of their strength and
endurance. My son's ship, though a powerful ocean steamer, was for
two whole hours battling head to sea off the Eddystone that night,
and for that time the lead gave no increase of soundings, so that
she could have made no headway during those two hours; while all
the time her yards had the St. Elmo's fire at their ends, looking
as though a blue light was burning at each yard-arm, and this was
about all they could see.
Yours sincerely,
ROBT. C. LESLIE."
The next letter, from a correspondent with whom I have the most
complete sympathy in some expressions of his postscript which are
yet, I consider, more for my own private ear than for the public
eye, describes one of the more malignant phases of the plague-wind,
which I forgot to notice in my lecture.
"BURNHAM, SOMERSET, _February 7th, 1884_.
DEAR SIR,--I read with great interest your first lecture at Oxford
on cloud and wind (very indifferently reported in 'The Times'). You
have given a name to a wind I've known for years. You call it the
plague--I call it the devil-wind: _e. g._, on April 29th, 1882,
morning warmer, then rain storms from east; afternoon, rain
squalls; wind, west by south, rough; barometer falling awfully;
4.30 p.m., tremendous wind.--April 30th, all the leaves of the
trees, all plants black and dead, as if a fiery blast had swept
over them. _All the hedges on windward side black as black tea._
Another devil-wind came towards the end of last summer. The next
day, all the leaves were falling sere and yellow, as if it were
late autumn.
I am, dear sir,
Yours faithfully,
A. H. BIRKETT."
I remember both these blights well; they were entirely terrific;
but only sudden maxima of the constant morbific power of this
wind;--which, if Mr. Birkett saw my _personal_ notices of,
intercalated among the scientific ones, he would find alluded to in
terms quite as vigorously damning as he could desire: and the
actual effect of it upon my thoughts and work has been precisely
that which would have resulted from the visible phantom of an evil
spirit, the absolute opponent of the Queen of the Air,--Typhon
against Athena,--in a sense of which I had neither the experience
nor the conception when I wrote the illustrations of the myth of
Perseus in 'Modern Painters.' Not a word of all those explanations
of Homer and Pindar could have been written in weather like that
of the last twelve years; and I am most thankful to have got them
written, before the shadow came, and I could still see what Homer
and Pindar saw. I quote one passage only--Vol. v., p. 141--for the
sake of a similitude which reminds me of one more thing I have to
say here--and a bit of its note--which I think is a precious little
piece, not of word-painting, but of simply told feeling--(_that_,
if people knew it, is my real power).
"On the Yorkshire and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low
and much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with its
strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are
flashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling race
and skim along the acclivities, and dart and _dip from crag to
dell, swallow-like_."
The dipping of the shadows here described of course is caused only
by that of the dingles they cross; but I have not in any of my
books yet dwelt enough on the difference of character between the
dipping and the mounting winds. Our wildest phase of the west wind
here at Coniston is 'swallow-like' with a vengeance, coming down on
the lake in swirls which spurn the spray under them as a fiery
horse does the dust. On the other hand, the softly ascending winds
express themselves in the grace of their cloud motion, as if set to
the continuous music of a distant song.[C]
The reader will please note also that whenever, either in 'Modern
Painters' or elsewhere, I speak of rate of flight in clouds, I am
thinking of it as measured by the horizontal distance overpast in
given time, and not as apparent only, owing to the nearness of the
spectator. All low clouds appear to move faster than high ones, the
pace being supposed equal in both: but when I speak of quick or
slow cloud, it is always with respect to a given altitude. In a
fine summer morning, a cloud will wait for you among the pines,
folded to and fro among their stems, with a branch or two coming
out here, and a spire or two there: you walk through it, and look
back to it. At another time, on the same spot, the fury of
cloud-flood drifts past you like the Rhine at Schaffhausen.
The space even of the doubled lecture does not admit of my entering
into any general statement of the action of the plague-cloud in
Switzerland and Italy; but I must not omit the following notes of
its aspect in the high Alps.
"SALLENCHES, _11th September, 1882_.
This morning, at half-past five, the Mont Blanc summit was clear,
and the greater part of the Aiguilles du Plan and Midi clear
dark--all, against pure cirri, lighted beneath by sunrise; the sun
of course not visible yet from the valley.
By seven o'clock, the plague-clouds had formed in _brown_ flakes,
down to the base of the Aiguille de Bionassay; entirely covering
the snowy ranges; the sun, as it rose to us here, shone only for
about ten minutes--gilding in its old glory the range of the
Dorons,--before one had time to look from peak to peak of it, the
plague-cloud formed from the west, hid Mont Joli, and steadily
choked the valley with advancing streaks of dun-colored mist.
Now--twenty minutes to nine--there is not _one ray_ of sunshine on
the whole valley, or on its mountains, from the Forclaz down to
Cluse.
These phenomena are only the sequel of a series of still more
strange and sad conditions of the air, which have continued among
the Savoy Alps for the last eight days, (themselves the sequel of
others yet more general, prolonged, and harmful). But the weather
was perfectly fine at Dijon, and I doubt not at Chamouni, on the
1st of this month. On the 2d, in the evening, I saw, from the Jura,
heavy thunderclouds in the west; on the 3d, the weather broke at
Morez, in hot thunder-showers, with intervals of scorching sun; on
the 4th, 5th, and 6th there was nearly continuous rain at St.
Cergues, the Alps being totally invisible all the time. The sky
cleared on the night of the 6th, and on the 7th I saw from the top
of the Dole all the western plateaux of Jura quite clearly; but
_the entire range of the Alps_, from the Moleson to the Salève, and
all beyond,--snow, crag and hill-side,--were wrapped and buried in
one unbroken gray-brown winding-sheet, of such cloud _as I had
never seen till that day touch an Alpine summit_.
The wind, from the east, (so that it blew _up_ over the edge of the
Dole cliff, and admitted of perfect shelter on the slope to the
west,) was bitter cold, and extremely violent: the sun overhead,
bright enough, and remained so during the afternoon; the
plague-cloud reaching from the Alps only about as far as the
southern shore of the lake of Geneva; but we could not see the
Salève; nor even the north shore, farther than to Morges! I reached
the Col de la Faucille at sunset, when, for a few minutes, the Mont
Blanc and Aiguille Verte showed themselves in dull red light, but
were buried again, before the sun was quite down, in the rising
deluge of cloud-poison. I saw no farther than the Voirons and
Brezon--and scarcely those, during the electric heat of the 9th at
Geneva; and last Saturday and Sunday have been mere whirls and
drifts of indecisive, but always sullen, storm. This morning I saw
the snows clear for the first time, having been, during the whole
past week, on steady watch for them.
I have written that the clouds of the 7th were such as I never
before saw on the Alps. Often, during the past ten years, I have
seen them on my own hills, and in Italy in 1874; but it has always
chanced to be fine weather, or common rain and cold, when I have
been among the snowy chains; and now from the Dole for the first
time I saw the plague-cloud on _them_."
[Footnote A: 'THE LOOK OF THE SKY.
'_To the_ EDITOR _of the_ ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.
'SIR,--I have been a very constant though not a scientific observer
of the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certain
feeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestial
phenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientific
observers by surprise. It would even appear that something like
these extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention of
such observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to a
variety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. But
to such people the look of the weather, and what comes of that
look, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone or
the depth or width of a band of the spectrum.