Curiosa: Even Herschel nods ...

[nebroadwe]

This morning's find in the queue: a crumbling, defaced, much-mended copy of First Lessons in Geography and Astronomy by J. A. Cummings. It seems to have been a moderately popular American textbook in the 1820s, distributed by various publishers up and down the east coast of the U.S. Let us pass over the geography lessons in silence, except to note the hand-colored maps (colored, possibly, by the same hand which drew a fat, angular, spike-haired figure on the title page -- a portrait of a teacher, perhaps? :-) and head straight for Lesson XXVI, The Solar System ...

    The system of Astronomy, which is now universally admitted to be true, is the Solar System.
    This system is called Solar from the Latin word Sol, which signifies the Sun.
    The Solar System consists of the sun, the planets, and the comets; and supposes the sun to be in the centre of the system, and all the planets to revolve round him from the west by south to east.
    The names of the primary planets ... are as follows:
    Mercury, Venus, Earth (1), Mars, Vesta, Juno, Ceres, Pallas, Jupiter (4), Saturn (7), Herschel (6)
    The figures at the right hand of some of the characters, denote the number of satellites or moons, which belong to those particular planets.

    The sun is a large, globular, luminous body, and the source of light and heat to the solar system. It is nearly nine hundred thousand miles in diameter, and more than a million times larger than our earth.

    From the effects which this immense body has in enlightening and warming us, and in promoting vegetable and animal life, we should naturally be disposed to believe it were a vast body of fire; but this opinion, although it prevailed for ages, is now rejected.
    Philosophy teaches us to believe, that if the rays of light which the sun darts forth through the heavens, were as cold as particles of ice, yet it is possible, they might be of such a nature, as, when mingled with bodies on the surface of the earth, to produce all the warmth, animation, and enlivening effects, which are now experienced.

    The sun appears to our naked sight to be perfectly flat and smooth; but from dark spots, which are frequently seen on its surface, and from their peculiar motion from one side of it to the other, it is well known, that it is a round body, and that it revolves on its axis once in 25 days.

    Dr. Herschel, a learned astronomer, supposes that these dark spots on the sun may be the tops of mountains, seen through the luminous clouds, which surround it, and that some of them are at least three hundred miles high.

    It is not improbable, therefore, that the sun may so nearly resemble this earth, as to be a suitable residence for rational and immortal beings.

It's the sensawunda in the final paragraph that really appeals to me -- looking up, the author doesn't just see "a large, globular, luminous body" but also a place where people might be living. Rational and immortal people, to boot. (I'm curious as to whether Mr. Cummings is indulging in his own flight of fancy here or reflecting a common one. His anthropological opinions, expressed in the geography lessons, are distressingly common.) I'm also tickled by the learned Dr. Herschel's conjectures about the Mountains of the Sun -- and, let's face it, by the fact that we nearly ended up with a solar system mnemonic on the order of "My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Homemade Noodles [Previously]." If Wikipedia is to be trusted on the subject, the planet Uranus went through quite an identity crisis before its guardians finally agreed upon the name to which it was to answer. No wonder it's all heeled over on its side like that ...