This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily
business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies.
It is they--and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our
compensation pendulums--which give us our time. To reverse the line of
Pope:
"'Tis with our watches as our judgments;--none
Go just alike, but each believes his own."
But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men--each upon their
own meridian--from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to
the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the
glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the
skies, chime twelve at midnight;--twelve for the pale student over his
flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he
crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of
languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean;
twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of
labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking,
broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and
expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries;
twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in
the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought
of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time.
Not only do we resort to the observation of the heavenly bodies for the
means of regulating and rectifying our clocks, but the great divisions
of day and month and year are derived from the same source. By the
constitution of our nature, the elements of our existence are closely
connected with celestial times. Partly by his physical organization,
partly by the experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as
he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and
parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night
(nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language,
with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest,
is a vital condition of the existence of such a creature as man. The
revolution of the year, with its various incidents of summer and winter,
and seed-time and harvest, is not less involved in our social, material,
and moral progress. It is true that at the poles, and on the equator,
the effects of these revolutions are variously modified or wholly
disappear; but as the necessary consequence, human life is extinguished
at the poles, and on the equator attains only a languid or feverish
development. Those latitudes only in which the great motions and
cardinal positions of the earth exert a mean influence, exhibit man in
the harmonious expansion of his powers. The lunar period, which lies
at the foundation of the _month_, is less vitally connected with human
existence and development; but is proved by the experience of every age
and race to be eminently conducive to the progress of civilization and
culture.
But indispensable as are these heavenly measures of time to our life and
progress, and obvious as are the phenomena on which they rest, yet owing
to the circumstance that, in the economy of nature, the day, the month,
and the year are not exactly commensurable, some of the most difficult
questions in practical astronomy are those by which an accurate division
of time, applicable to the various uses of life, is derived from the
observation of the heavenly bodies. I have no doubt that, to the Supreme
Intelligence which created and rules the universe, there is a harmony
hidden to us in the numerical relation to each other of days, months,
and years; but in our ignorance of that harmony, their practical
adjustment to each other is a work of difficulty. The great
embarrassment which attended the reformation of the calendar, after the
error of the Julian period had, in the lapse of centuries, reached ten
(or rather twelve) days, sufficiently illustrates this remark. It is
most true that scientific difficulties did not form the chief obstacle.
Having been proposed under the auspices of the Roman pontiff, the
Protestant world, for a century and more, rejected the new style.
It was in various places the subject of controversy, collision, and
bloodshed.[A] It was not adopted in England till nearly two centuries
after its introduction at Rome; and in the country of Struve and the
Pulkova equatorial, they persist at the present day in adding eleven
minutes and twelve seconds to the length of the tropical year.
[Footnote A: Stern's "_Himmelskunde_," p. 72.]