alogies sufficiently to fish them
out of a little dilute science.

Light and sound are the daughters of motion. Color and music, the
ethereal and aerial offspring of this ancestry, born with the world,
fostered in Biblical times, expanded in China and Egypt, living on the
painted jar, and breathing in the oaten reed, deified in Greece, and
analyzed to-day, are natural cousins at the least, and they have come
from the spacious home of their progenitor, upon our dusky and silent
sphere, like Peace and Goodwill, with hands bound in an oath and
contract never to part. We will spare a dissertation on chaos; we will
not speak of matter and inertia; but as our greatest and purest fountain
of light is the sun, we may be allowed a modest exposition of his
philosophical state, as a granite gate to the garden beyond. Ninety-five
millions of miles to the north, east, south, or west of us, up or down,
as the case may be, stands the molten centre of our system--an orb,
whose atoms, turbulent with electricity, gravity, or whatever mechanists
please to call the attraction of particle for particle, are forever
urging to its centre, forever meeting with repulsions when they slide
within the forbidden limits of molecular exclusiveness, and eternally
vibrating with a quake and quiver which lights and heats the worlds
around. In other words, this agitation is one that, transmitted to an
ethereal medium, produces therein corresponding vibrations or waves,
which are light and heat.

As sound is the symmetrical aerial motion, if our atmosphere embraced
our sun, and extended throughout space, we should _perhaps_ hear in the
ambient the fundamental chord, resolvable into the diatonic scale--as we
look upon the beam of white which the prism decomposes into the solar
spectrum, and in the ghostly watches of the night, we might recognize
the 'music of the spheres' as the planets rushed around their airy
orbits, with a noise like the 'noise of many waters,' no longer a poetic
illusion, but a harmonic fact.

Light, whether white or colored, is transmitted through ether in waves
of measurable length: each atom of the medium, when disturbed, moves
around its place of rest in an orbit of variable dimension and
eccentricity. On the character of the orbit depends the character of the
light; and on the velocity of orbit motion, its intensity. Like the
gentle pulsations which circle from the point where fell the pebble in
the purple lake, come the gratefu