Chapter I (1)

The port of La Union, our point of departure, is in the little Republic of San Salvador, which, in common with Nicaragua and Honduras, touches on the Bay of Fonseca. It is built near the head of a subordinate bay, of the same name with itself, at the foot of the volcano of Conchagua, which rises between it and the sea, cutting it off from the ocean-breezes, and rendering it, in consequence, comparatively hot and unhealthy. It is a small town, with a population scarcely exceeding fifteen hundred souls; but it is, nevertheless, the most important port of San Salvador. Here, during the season of the great fairs of San Miguel, may be seen vessels of nearly all the maritime nations, --broad-hulled and sleepy-looking ships from the German free-cities, taut American clippers, sturdy English brigs, and even Peruvian and Genoese nondescripts, with crews in red nightcaps.

At this time La Union holds high holiday; its _Comandante_, content at other times to lounge about in the luxury of a real undress uniform, now puts on his broadcloth and sash, and sustains a sweltering dignity; while all the brown girls of the place, arrayed in their gayest apparel, wage no timorous war on the hearts and pockets of too susceptible skippers. "Ah, me!" exclaimed our landlady, "is it not terrible? Excepting the Señora D. and myself, there is not a married woman in La Union!" "One wouldn't think so," soliloquized the _Teniente_, as he gazed reflectively into the street, where a dozen naked children, squatting in the sand, disputed the freedom of the highway with a score of lean dogs and bow-backed pigs of voracious appetites.

To me there was nothing specially new in La Union. The three years which had elapsed since my previous visit had not been marked by any great architectural achievement, and although the same effective chain-gang of two convicts seemed still to be occupied with the mole, the advance in that great public work was not perceptible to the eye. My old host and hostess were also the same,--a shade older in appearance, perhaps, but with hearts as warm and hospitalities as lavish as before. Only "La Gringita" had changed from the doe-eyed child of easy confidences into a quiet and somewhat distant girl, full in figure, and with a glance which sometimes betrayed the glow of latent, but as yet unconscious passion. In these sunny climes the bud blossoms and the young fruit ripens in a single day.

With my companions, however, the case was different. The _Teniente_ could never cease being surprised that the commercial and naval facilities of the splendid bay before us had been so long overlooked. "What a place for a naval station, with its spacious and secure anchorages, abundant water, and facilities for making repairs and obtaining supplies! Why, all the fleets of the globe might assemble here, and never foul spars or come across each other's hawsers! What a site, just in that little bay, for a ship-yard! The bottom is pure sand, and there are full ten fathoms of water within a hundred yards of the shore! And then those high islands protecting the entrance! A fort on that point and a battery over yonder would close in the whole bay, with its five hundred square miles of area, against every invader, and make it as safe as Cronstadt!" But what astonished the _Teniente_ more than anything else was, not that the English had seized the bay in 1849, but that they had ever given it up afterwards. "Bull should certainly abandon his filibustering habits, or else stick to his plunder; the example was a bad one for his offspring!"

And as for H., our artist, he, too, was surprised at all times and about everything. It surprised him "to hear mere children talk Spanish!" To be able to help himself to oranges from the tree without paying for them surprised him; so did the habit of sleeping in hammocks, and the practice of dressing children in the cheap and airy garb of a straw hat and cigar! He was surprised that he should come to see "a real volcano, like that of San Miguel, with real smoke rolling up from its mysterious depths; but what surprised him most was, that they should give him pieces of soap by way of making change in the market, and that he could buy a boat-load of oysters for a shilling!"

As for Don Henrique, who had resided twenty years in Nicaragua, he was only surprised at the surprise of others. He had a quiet, imperturbable contempt for the country and everything in it, was satisfied with a cool corridor and cigar, and had no ambition beyond that of some day returning to Paris. Above all, he was a foe to unnecessary exertion.

The ascent of Conchagua was the most important incident of our stay in La Union, both in the excitements of the scramble and in the satisfactory nature of our observations from its summit. We left the port in the afternoon, with the view of passing the night in the highest hut on the mountain-side, so as to reach the summit early in the morning, and thus secure time for our observations. Doña Maria had given us her own well-trained servant, Dolores, who afterwards became a most important member of our little party; and he was now loaded down with baskets and bottles, while the _Teniente_, H., and myself undertook the responsible charge of the instruments.

Our path was one seldom travelled, and was exceedingly rough and narrow. Here it would wind down into one of the deep ravines which seam the mountain near its base, and, after following the little stream which trickled at its bottom for a short distance, turn abruptly up the opposite side, and run for a while along a crest or ridge of _scoriæ_ or disintegrated lava, only, however, to plunge into another ravine beyond. And thus alternately scrambling up and down, yet gradually ascending diagonally, we worked our way towards the hut where we were to pass the night. The slopes of the mountain were already in shadow, and the gloom of the dense forests and of the deep ravines was so profound, that we might have persuaded ourselves that night had fallen, had we not heard the cheerful notes of unseen birds that were nestling among the tree-tops. After two hours of ascent, the slope of the mountain became more abrupt and decided, the ravines shallower, and the intervening ridges less elevated. The forest, too, became more open, and the trees smaller and less encumbered with vines, and between them we could catch occasional glimpses of the bay, with its waters golden under the slant rays of the declining sun. Finally we came to a kind of terrace or shelf of the mountain, with here and there little patches of ground, newly cleared, and black from the recent burning of the undergrowth,--the only preparation made by the Indian cultivator for planting his annual maize-crop. He has never heard of a plough; a staff shod with iron, with which he pries a hole in the earth for the reception of the seed, is the only agricultural implement with which he is acquainted. When the young blade appears, he may possibly lop away the tree-sprouts and rank weeds with his _machete_: but all the rest he leaves to Nature, and the care of those unseen protectors of the harvest whom he propitiates in the little church of Conehagua by the offering of a candle, and in the depth of the forest, in some secluded spot of ancient sanctity, by libations of _chicha_, poured out, with strange dances, at the feet of some rudely sculptured idol which his fathers venerated before him, and which he inwardly believes will come out "all right" in the end, notwithstanding its present disgrace and the Padre's denunciations.

The mountain terrace which we had now reached is three thousand feet above the sea, half a mile long, of varying width, and seems to be the top of some great bed of _scoriæ_ which long ago slipped down on an inclined plane of lava to its present level. Whatever its origin, it is certainly a beautiful spot, thinly covered with trees, and carpeted with grass, on which, at the time of our visit, a few cows were grazing, while half a dozen goats gazed at us in motionless surprise from the gray rocks to which they had retreated on our approach. We found the hut in which we were to rest for the night perched on the very edge of the terrace, where it overlooked the whole expanse of the bay, with its high islands and purple shores. At this airy height, and open to every breeze, its inhabitants enjoy a delicious temperature; and I could well understand how it was that Doña Maria, notwithstanding the difficulties of the ascent, often came up here to escape the debilitating heats of the port, and enjoy the magnificent prospect. The dwellers on this mountain-perch consisted of an old man with his two sons and their wives, and a consequent round dozen of children, all of whom gave Dolores the cordial welcome of an old friend, which was reflected on his companions with equal warmth. Our mules were quickly unsaddled and cared for, and our instruments carefully suspended beneath a rough shed of poles covered with branches of trees, which stood before the hut, and answered the purpose of a corridor in keeping off the sun. Here also we chose to swing our hammocks; for the hut itself was none of the largest, and, having but a single room, would require packing more closely than suited our tastes, in order to afford us the narrowest accommodation. It is true, the two Benedicts volunteered to sleep outside with Dolores, and resign the interior to the old man, the women, the children, and the strangers. But the _Teniente_ thought there would be scant room, even if we had the whole to ourselves; while H. was overcome by "the indelicacy of the suggestion."

The sunset that evening was one of transcendent beauty, heightened by the thousand-hued reflections from the masses of clouds which had been piling up, all the afternoon, around the distant mountains of Honduras, and which Dolores told us betokened the approach of the rainy season. Bathed in crimson and gold, they shed a glowing haze over the intervening country, and were reproduced in the broad mirror of the bay below us, so that we seemed to be suspended and floating in an Iris-like sea of light and beauty. But night falls rapidly under the tropics; the sunsets are as brief as they are brilliant; and as soon as the sun had sunk below the horizon, the gorgeous colors rapidly faded away, leaving only leaden clouds on the horizon and a sullen body of water at our feet.

A love of music seems to be universal among all classes in Central America, especially among the _Ladinos_ or mixed population. And it is scarcely possible to find a house, down to the meanest hut, that does not possess a violin or guitar, or, in default of these, a mandolin, on which one or more of its inmates are able to perform with considerable skill, and often with taste and feeling. The violin, however, is esteemed most highly, and its fortunate possessor cherishes it above wife or children, he keeps it with his white buckskin shoes, red sash, and only embroidered shirt, in the solitary trunk with cyclopean lock and antediluvian key, which goes so far, in Central American economy, to make up the scanty list of domestic furniture. The youngest of our hosts was the owner of one of these instruments, of European manufacture, which had cost him, I dare say, many a load of maize, wearily carried on his naked back down to the port. As the evening advanced, he produced it, with an air of satisfaction, from its secure depository, and, leaning against a friendly tree, gave us a specimen of his skill. It is true, we did not expect much from our swarthy friend, whose only garment was his trousers of cotton cloth, tucked up above his knees; and we were therefore all the more surprised, when, after some preliminary tuning of the instrument, he pressed the bow on its strings with a firm and practised hand, and led us, with masterly touch, through some of the finest melodies of our best operas. Very few amateurs of any country, with all their advantages of instruction, could equal the skill of that poor dweller on the flank of the volcano of Conchagua; none certainly could surpass him in the delicacy and feeling of his execution. H., on whom, as an artist, and himself no mean musician, we had already devolved the task of being enthusiastic and demonstrative over matters of this kind, applauded vehemently, and cried, "_Bravo!_" and "_Encore!_" and ended in convincing us of the reality of his delight, by pressing his brandy-flask into the hands of the performer, and urging him to "drink it all, every drop, and then give us another!" Our mountain Paganini, I fear, interpreted the behest too literally; or else H.'s enthusiasm never afterwards rose to so high a pitch; at any rate, he was never known to manifest it in so expansive a manner.

"And where did your friend learn his music?"

He had caught it up, he said, from time to time, as he had floated, with his canoe-load of plantains, chickens, and yucas, around the vessels-of-war that occasionally visit the port; neglecting his traffic, no doubt, in eagerly listening to the music of the bands or the individual performances of the officers. He had had no instructor, except "_un pobre Italiano_," who came to La Union with an exhibition of _fantoccini_, died there of fever, and was buried like a Christian in the Campo Santo adjoining the church: and Paganini removed his hat reverentially, and made the sign of the cross on his swarthy bosom. And now, most incredulous of readers, are you answered?

During the night we were visited by the first storm of the season, and it opened the flood-gates of the skies right grandly, with booming thunders and blinding lightning, and a dash of rain that came through our imperfect shelter as through a sieve. Driven inside the hut, where we contested the few square feet of bare earthen floor with the pigs and pups of the establishment, we passed a most miserable night, and were glad to rise with the earliest dawn,--ourselves to continue our ascent of the mountain, and our hosts to plant their mountain _milpas_, while the ground was yet moist from the midnight rain. They told us that the maize, if put into the earth immediately after the first rain of the season, was always more vigorous and productive than that planted afterwards; why they knew not; but "so it had been told them by their fathers."

The air was deliciously fresh and cool, and the foliage of the trees seemed almost pulsating with life and light under the morning sun, as we bade our hosts "_Á Dios!_" and resumed our course up the mountain. There was no longer any path, and we had to pick our way as we were able, among blocks of blistered rocks, over fallen trunks of trees, and among gnarled oaks, which soon began to replace the more luxuriant vegetation of the lower slopes. H., dragged from his mule by a scraggy limb, was shocked to find that the first inquiry of his companions was not about the safety of his neck, but of the barometer. At the end of an hour, the ascent becoming every moment more abrupt, we had passed the belt of trees and bushes, and reached the smooth and scoriaceous cone, which, during the rainy season, appears from the bay to be covered with a velvety mantle of green. It was now black and forbidding, from the recent burning of the dry grass or _sacate_, and so steep as to render direct ascent impossible. I proposed to leave the mules and proceed on foot, but the _Teniente_ entered a solemn protest against anything of the sort:--"If the mules couldn't carry him up, he couldn't go; his family was affected with hereditary palpitation of the heart, and if any one of them suffered more from it than the others, he was the unfortunate victim! Climbing elevations of any kind, and mountains in particular, brought on severe attacks; and we might as well understand, at once, that, if in 'Hunting a Pass' there was any climbing to be done, some one else must do it!" And here I may mention a curious fact, probably hitherto unknown to the faculty, which was developed in our subsequent explorations, namely, that palpitation of the heart is contagious. H. was attacked with it on our third day out, and Don Henrique had formidable symptoms at sight of the merest hillock.

Under the lead of Dolores, by judicious zig-zagging, and by glow and painful advances, we finally reached the _vigía_,--the mules thoroughly blown, but the _Teniente_ and the instruments safe. The latter were speedily set up, and the observations, which were to exercise so important an influence as a basis for our future operations, satisfactorily made. We found the mountain to be 4860 feet above the sea, barometrical admeasurement, and the flagstaff itself in latitude 13° 18' N. and longitude 87° 45' W. We obtained bearings on nearly all the volcanic cones on the plain of Leon, as also on many of the detached mountain-peaks of Honduras and San Salvador, as the commencement of a system of triangulations which subsequently enabled us to construct the first map of the country at all approximating to accuracy. At noon on the day of our visit, the thermometer marked a temperature of 16° of Fahrenheit below that of the port.

It is a singular circumstance, that Captain Sir Edward Belcher, who surveyed the Bay of Fonseca in 1838, speaks of Conchagua as a mountain exhibiting no evidences of volcanic origin. Apart from its form, which is itself conclusive on that point, its lower slopes are ridged all over with dikes of lava, some of which come down to the water's edge, in rugged, black escarpments. The mountain had two summits: one comparatively broad and rugged, with a huge crater, and a number of smaller vents; and a second and higher one, nearest the bay,--the _ash-heap_ of the volcano proper, on which the _vigía_ is erected, and whence our observations were made. This is a sugar-loaf in form, with steep sides, and at its summit scarcely affording standing-room for a dozen horsemen. It is connected with the main part of the mountain by a narrow ridge, barely broad enough for a mule-path, with treeless slopes on either hand, so steep, that, on our return, the _Teniente_ preferred risking an attack of "palpitation" to riding along its crest.

After loosening several large stones from the side of the cone, and watching them bound down the steep declivity, dashing the _scoriæ_ like spray before them, and bearing down the dwarf trees in their path like grass beneath the mower's scythe, until they rumbled away with many a crash in the depths of the forest at the base of the mountain, and after making over to the grateful old man of the _vigía_ the remnants of Doña Maria's profusion in the shape of sandwiches and cold chicken, we commenced our descent, taking the shorter path by which I had descended three years before. It conducted us past the great spring of Yololtoca, to which the Indian girls of the _pueblo_ of Conchagua, three miles distant, still come to get their water, and down the ancient path and over the rocks worn smooth by the naked feet of their mothers and their mothers' mothers, until, at six o'clock in the afternoon, we defiled, tired and hungry, into the sweltering streets of La Union. Oysters _ad libitum_, (which, being translated, means as fast as three men could open them,) one of Doña Maria's best dinners, and a bath in the bay at bedtime calmed our appetites and restored our energies, and we went to sleep with the gratified consciousness that we had successfully taken the first step in the prosecution of our great enterprise.

I have alluded to the oysters of La Union; but I should prove ungrateful indeed, after the manifold delicious repasts which they afforded us, were I to deny them the tribute of a paragraph. It is generally believed that the true oyster of our shores is found nowhere else, or at least only in northern latitudes. But an exception must be made in favor of the waters of the Bay of Fonseca. Here they are found in vast beds, in all the subordinate bays where the streams deposit their sediment, and where, with the rise and fall of the tide, they obtain that alternation of salt and brackish water which seems to be necessary to their perfection. They are the same rough-coated, delicious mollusks as those of our own coasts, and by no means to be degraded by a comparison with the muddy, long-bearded, and, to Christian palates, coppery abominations of the British Islands, which in their flattened shape and scalloped edges seem to betray an impure ancestry,--in point of fact, to be a bad cross between the scallop and the oyster.

At low tide some of the beds are nearly bare, and then the Indians take them up readily with their hands. The ease with which they may be got will appear from the circumstance, that for some time after our arrival we paid but a real (twelve and a half cents) for each canoe-load, of from five to six bushels. The people of La Union seldom use them, and we were therefore able to establish the "ruling rates." They continued at a real a load, until H., with reckless generosity, one day paid our improvised oyster-man two reals for his cargo, who thereupon, appealing to this bad precedent, refused to go out, unless previously assured of receiving the advanced rate. This led to the immediate arrest of H., on an indictment charging him with "wilfully and maliciously combining and conniving with one Juan Sanchez, (colored,) to put up the price of the necessaries of life in La Union, in respect of the indispensable article vulgarly known as _ostrea Virginiana_, but in the language of the law and of science designated as oysters." On this indictment he was summarily tried, and, in consequence of aggravating his offence by an attempt at exculpation, was condemned to suffer the full penalties of the law, in such cases provided, namely, "to pay the entire cost of all the oysters that might thenceforth be consumed by the prosecuting parties and the court, and, at eleven o'clock, past meridian, to be taken from his bed, thence to the extremity of the mole, and there _inducted_." Which sentence was carried into rigorous execution. Nor was he allowed to resume his former rank in the party, until, by a masterly piece of diplomacy, he organized an opposition oyster-boat, and a consequent competition, which soon brought Juan Sanchez to terms, and oysters to their just market-value.

That the aboriginal dwellers around the Bay of Fonseca appreciated its conchological treasures, we had afterwards ample evidence; for at many places on its islands and shores we found vast heaps of oyster-shells, which seemed to have been piled up as reverent reminiscences of the satisfaction which their contents had afforded.

During my previous visit to La Union, in March, 1850, I had observed that the north winds, which prevail during that month in the Bay of Honduras, sometimes sweep entirely across the continent with such force as to raise a considerable sea in the Bay of Fonseca. I thence inferred that there must exist a pass or break in the great mountain-range of the Cordilleras, through which the wind could have an uninterrupted or but partially interrupted sweep. This was confirmed by the fact that the current of air which reached the bay was narrow, affecting only a width of about ten or twelve miles. This circumstance impressed me at that time only as indicating a remarkable topographical feature of the country; but afterwards, when the impracticability of a canal at Nicaragua and the deficiencies in respect of ports for a railway at Tehuantepec had become established, I was led to reflect upon it in connection with a plan for inter-oceanic communication by railway through Honduras; and, as explained in the introduction, we were now here to test the accuracy of my previous conclusions. Our observations at the top of Conchagua had signally confirmed them.

We could distinctly make out the existence of a great valley extending due north, and our glasses revealed a marked depression in the Cordilleras, which in all the maps were represented as maintaining here the character of a high, unbroken range. Of course no such valley as opened before us could exist without a considerable stream flowing through it. But the maps showed neither valley nor river. This circumstance did not, however, discourage us; for my former travels and explorations in Nicaragua had shown me, that, notwithstanding the country had occupied the attention of geographers for more than three centuries, in connection with a project for a canal between the oceans, its leading and most obvious physical features were still either grossly misconceived or utterly unknown.

The leading fact of the existence of some kind of a pass having been sufficiently established by our observations from Conchagua, we next set to work to obtain such information from the natives as might assist our further proceedings. This was a tedious task, and called for the exercise of all our patience; for it is impossible to convey in language an adequate idea of the abject ignorance of most of the inhabitants of Central America concerning its geography and topographical features. Those who would naturally be supposed to be best informed, the priests, merchants, and lawyers, are really the most ignorant, and it is only from the _arrieros_, or muleteers, and the _correos_, or runners, that any knowledge of this kind can be obtained, and then only in a very confused form, and with most preposterous and contradictory estimates of distances and elevations.

We nevertheless made out that the mouth of a river or _estero_, laid down in Sir Edward Belcher's chart, on the opposite side of the bay in front of La Union, was really that of the river Goascoran, a considerable stream having its rise at a point due north, and not far from Comayagua, the capital of Honduras, which, we also ascertained, was seated in the midst of a great plain, bearing the same name. A large stream, it was said, flowed past that city,--but whether the Goascoran or some other, or whether it flowed north or south, neither _arriero_ nor _correo_ could tell.

The navigability of the Goascoran was also a doubtful question. According to some, it could be forded everywhere; others declared it impassable for many leagues above its mouth: a discrepancy which we were able to reconcile by reference to its probable state at different seasons of the year.

Fixing an early day for taking the field in earnest, and leaving H. and Don Henrique to make the necessary preparations, I improved the interval, in company with Lieutenant J., in making a boat exploration of the Goascoran. Obtaining a ship's gig, with two oarsmen and a supply of provisions, we left La Union at dawn on the 15th of April. We found that the river enters the bay by a number of channels, through low grounds covered with mangrove-trees. It was at half-tide, and we experienced no difficulty in entering. Our course at first was tortuous, and it seemed as if the river had lost itself in a labyrinth of channels, and we were ourselves much confused with regard to our true direction. Keeping, however, in the strongest current, at the end of half an hour we penetrated beyond the little delta of the river, and the belt of mangroves, to firm ground. Here the stream was confined to a single channel two hundred yards broad, with banks of clay and loam from six to ten feet high. The lands back appeared to be level, and, although well covered with ordinary forest-trees, were apparently subject to overflow. We observed cattle in several grassy openings, and here and there a _vaquero's_ hut of branches; for it is a general practice of the _hacienderos_ to drive down their herds to the low grounds of the coasts and rivers, during the dry season, and as soon as the grass on the hills or highlands begins to grow sere and yellow. We observed also occasional heaps of oyster-shells on the banks, or half washed away by the river; and on the sand-spits at the bends of the stream, and in all the little shady nooks of the shore, we saw thousands of water-fowl, ducks of almost every variety, including the heavy muscovy and the lively teal; and there were flocks of white and crimson ibises, and solitary, long-legged, contemplative cranes, and gluttonous pelicans; while myriads of screaming curlews scampered along the line of the receding tide to snap up imprudent snails and the numerous minute _crustaceæ_ which drift about in these brackish waters. The familiar kingfisher was also there, coming down with an occasional arrowy dash on some unsuspecting minnow, and then flapping away leisurely for a quiet meal in the shady recesses of a neighboring tree.

We fired on a flock of ducks, killing a number and wounding others, all of which we secured except one which struggled away into an eddy under the bank. We pushed in, and my hand was extended to pick him up, when a slimy, corrugated head, with distended jaws and formidable teeth, rose to the surface before me, paused an instant, then shot forward, and, closing on the wounded bird, disappeared. The whole was done so quickly as to escape the notice of my companions, who would hardly believe me when I told them that we had been robbed by an alligator. We lost a duck, but gained an admonition; and I scarcely need add that our half-formed purpose of taking a bath in the next cool bend of the river was abandoned.

When the tide had run out, we were able to form a better notion of the river. We found, that, although near the end of the dry season, it was still a fine stream, with a large body of water, but spread over so wide a channel as to preclude anything like useful navigation, except with artificial aids. In places it was so shallow that our little boat found difficulty in advancing. But this did not disappoint us; for nothing like a mixed transit with transhipments had ever entered into my plan, which looked only to an unbroken connection by rail from one sea to the other. At four o'clock, satisfied that no useful purpose could be effected by going farther up the stream, we stopped at a collection of huts called Las Sandías,--not inappropriately, for the whole sloping bank of the river, which here appeared to be little better than a barren sand-bed, was covered, for a quarter of a mile, with a luxuriant crop of water- and musk-melons, now in their perfection. We purchased as many as we could carry off for a _real_. They were full, rich, and juicy, and proved to be a grateful restorative, after our day's exposure to the direct rays of the sun, and their scarcely less supportable reflection from the water. The melon-patch of Las Sandías is overflowed daring the rainy season, and probably the apparently bare, sandy surface hides rich deposits of soil below.

We found the stream here alive with an active and apparently voracious fish, varying in length from fourteen to twenty inches, reddish in color, and closely resembling the Snapper of the Atlantic coast of Central America. The male inhabitants of Las Sandías were occupied in catching these fishes with hand-nets, in the rifts and currents; and the women were busy in cleaning and drying them. Their offal had accumulated around the huts in offensive heaps, and gave out an odor which was almost insupportable, but of which the women appeared to take no notice. We did not, therefore, trespass long on their hospitality, but returned to our boat and started back to La Union. As night came on, the trees along the river's bank were thronged with _chachalacas_, which almost deafened us with their querulous screams. Two well-directed shots gave us half a dozen,--for the young _chachalaca_ is not to be despised on the table,--and we added them to our stock of water-fowls and melons as tempting trophies to our companions from the new Canaan on which they were venturing.

[To be continued.]

KEPLER.

The acceptance of a doctrine is often out of all proportion to the authority that fortifies it. There are sweeps of generalization quite permeable to objection, which yet find metaphysical support; there are irrefragable dogmas which the mind drops as futile and fruitless. It is recorded of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, that it found reception from no physician then over forty years old. We believe the splendid nebular construction of Laplace has its own difficulties; yet what noble or aspiring mind does not find interior warranties for the truth of that audacious synthesis? Is it that the soul darts responsive impartments to the heavens? that the whirl is elemental in the mind? that baffling intervals stretch deeper within us, and shoals of stars with no parallax appear?

Among the functions of Science, then, may well be included its power as a metre of the intellectual advance of mankind. In these splendid symbols man writes the record of his advancing humanity. How all is interwoven with the All! A petrified national mind will certainly appear in a petrified national Science. And that sublime upsurging from the depths of human nature which came with the last half of the eighteenth century appeared not alone in the new political and social aspirations, but in a fresh insight into Nature. This spirit manifested itself in the new sciences that sprang from the new modes of vision,--Magnetism, Electricity, Chemistry,--the old crystalline spell departing before a dynamical system of Physics, before the thought of the universe as a living organic whole. And what provokers does the discovery of the celestial circles bring to new circles of politics and social life!

The illustrations of Astronomy to this thought are very large. First of the sciences to assume a perfectly rational form, it presents the eternal type of the unfolding of the speculative spirit of man. This springs, no doubt, from the essentially subjective character of astronomy,--more than all the other sciences a construction of the creative reason. From the initiative of scientific astronomy, when the early Greek geometers referred the apparent diurnal movements to geometrical laws, to the creation of the nebular hypothesis, the logical filiation of the leading astronomical conceptions obeys corresponding tidal movements in humanity. Thus it is that

"through the ages one increasing purpose
runs
And the thoughts of men are widened with the
process of the suns."

It was for reasons the Ptolemaic system so long held its sway. It was for reasons it went, too, when it did, hideous and oppressive nightmare! The celestial revelations of the sixteenth century came as the necessary complement of the new mental firmaments then dawning on the thought of man. The intellectual revolution caused by the discovery of the double motion of our planet was undoubtedly the mightiest that man had ever experienced, and its effect was to change the entire aspect of his speculative and practical activity. What a proof that ideas rule the world! Two hundred and fifty years ago, certain new sidereal conceptions arose in the minds of half a dozen philosophers, (isolated and utterly destitute of political or social influence, powerful only in the possession of a sublime and seminal thought,)--conceptions which, during these two centuries, have succeeded in overthrowing a doctrine as old as the human mind, closely interknit with the entire texture of opinions, authority, politics, and religion, and establishing a theory flatly contradicted by the universal dictates of experience and common sense, and true only to the transcendental and interpretative Reason!

At the advent of Modern Astronomy, the apparition of the German, John Kepler, presents itself. Familiarly associated in general apprehension with that inductive triad known as "Kepler's Laws," which form the foundation of Celestial Geometry, it is much less generally known that he was an august and oracular soul, one of those called Mystics and Transcendentalists, perhaps the greatest genius for analogy that ever lived,--that he led a truly epic life, a hero and helper of men, a divine martyr of humanity.

The labors of Kepler were mathematical, optical, cosmographical, and astronomical,--but chiefly astronomical. Two or three of his principal works are the "Cosmographic Mystery," (_Mysterium Cosmographicum,_) the "New Astronomy," (_Astronomia Nova, seu Physica Caelestis,_) and the "Harmonies of the World" (_Harmonices Mundi_). His whole published works comprise some thirty or forty volumes, while twenty folio volumes of manuscript lie in the Library at St. Petersburg. These Euler, Lexell, and Kraft undertook some years ago to examine and publish, but the result of this examination has never appeared. An elegant complete edition of the works of Kepler is at present being issued at Frankfort, under the editorship of Frisch.[1] It is to be in sixteen volumes, 8vo, two of which are published. For his biography, the chief source is the folio volume of Correspondence, published in 1718, by Hansch,[2] who has prefixed to these letters between Kepler and his contemporaries a Life, in which his German heartiness beats even through the marble encasement of his Latinity.

[Footnote 1: _Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia._ Edidit CH. FRISCH.]

[Footnote 2: _Epistolae ad Joannem Keplerum scriptae._ MICHAEL GOTTLIEB HANSCHIUS. Lipsiae, 1718.]

We have always admired, as a stroke of wit, the way Hansch takes to indicate Kepler's birthplace. Disdaining to use any but mathematical symbols for so great a mathematician, he writes that he was born on the 21st of December, 1571, in longitude 29° 7', latitude 48° 54'! It may be worth mentioning, that on this cryptic spot stood the little town of Weil in the Duchy of Würtemberg. His birth was cast at a time when his parents were reduced to great poverty, and he received very little early schooling. He was, however, sent to Tübingen, and here he pursued the scholastic studies of the age, designing for the Church. But the old eternal creed-questionings arose in his mind. He stumbled at the omnipresence of Christ's body, wrote a Latin poem against it, and, when he had completed his studies, got for a _testimonium_ that he had distinguished himself by his oratorical talents, but was considered unfit to be a fellow-laborer in the Church of Würtemberg. A larger priesthood awaited him.

The astronomical lectureship at the University of Grätz, in Styria, falling vacant, Kepler was in his twenty-third year appointed to fill it. He was, as he tells us, "better furnished with talent than knowledge." But, no doubt, things had conspired to forward him. While at Tübingen, under the mathematician Mästlin, he had eagerly seized all the hints his master threw out of the doctrines of Copernicus, integrating them with interior authorities of his own. "The motion of the earth, which Copernicus had proved by mathematical reasons, I wanted to prove by physical, or, if you prefer it, metaphysical reasons." So he wrote in his "Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum," which he published two years after going to Grätz, that is, in his twenty-fifth year. In this book his fiery and mystical spirit first found expression, flaming forth in meteoric coruscations. The problem which Kepler attempted to solve in the "Prodromus" was no less than the determination of the harmonic relations of the distances of the planets, which it was given him to solve more than twenty years afterwards. The hypothesis which he adopted proved utterly fallacious; but his primal intuition, that numerical and geometric relations connect the velocities, periods, and distances of the planets, was none the less fruitful and sublime.

Of the facts of Kepler's external life, we may simply say, for the sake of readier apprehension, that, after remaining six years at Grätz, he, in 1600, on the invitation of Tycho Brahe, Astronomer Royal to Rodolph II. of Germany, removed to Prague and associated himself with Tycho, who shortly afterwards dying, Kepler was appointed in his place. The chief work was the construction of the new astronomical tables called the Rodolphine Tables, and on these he was engaged many years. In this situation he continued till 1613, when he left it to assume a professorship at Linz. Here he remained some years, and the latter part of his life was spent as astrologer to Wallenstein. Kepler is described as small and meagre of person, and he speaks of himself as "troublesome and choleric in politics and domestic matters." He was twice married, and left a wife and numerous children ill-provided for.

Indeed, a painful and perturbed life fell to the lot of Kepler. The most crushing poverty all his life oppressed him. For, though his nominal salary as Astronomer Royal was large enough, yet the treasury was so exhausted that it was impossible for him ever to obtain more than a pittance. What a sad tragedy do these words, in a letter to Mästlin, reveal:--"I stand whole days in the antechamber, and am nought for study." And then he adds the sublime compensation: "I keep up my spirits, however, with the thought that I serve, not the Emperor alone, but the whole human race,--that I am laboring not merely for the present generation, but for posterity. If God stand by me and look to the victuals, I hope to perform something yet." Eternal type of the consolation which the consciousness of truth brings with it, his ejaculation on the discovery of his third law remains one of the sublimest utterances of the human mind:--"The die is cast; the book is written,--to be read now or by posterity, I care not which: it may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer!" Cast in a stormy and chaotic age, he was persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics on account of the purity and elevation of his religious ideas; and from the disclosures of Baron von Breitschwert [1] it seems, that, in the midst of his sublimest labors, he spent five years in the defence of his poor old mother against a charge of witchcraft. He died in 1630, in his sixtieth year, (with the prospect of starvation before him,) of a fever which he caught when on a journey to Ratisbon, whither he had gone in the attempt to get part of his pay!

[Footnote 1: _Johann Keppler's Leben und Wirken: nach neuerlich aufgefundenen Manuscripten bearbeitet._ Stuttgart, 1813.]

In what bewildering and hampering environment he found himself with the "Tübingen doctors" and the "Würtemberg divines," his letters reveal. On the publication of the "Prodromus," Hafenreffer wrote to warn him:--"God forbid you should endeavor to bring your hypothesis openly into argument with the Holy Scriptures! I require of you to treat the subject merely as a mathematician, and to leave the peace of the Church undisturbed." To the Tübingen doctors he replied:--"The Bible speaks to me of things belonging to human life as men are used to speak of them. It is no manual of Optics or of Astronomy; it has a higher object in view. It is a culpable misuse of it to seek in it for answers on worldly things. Joshua wished for the day to be lengthened. God hearkened to his wish. How? This is not to be inquired after." And surely the long-vexed argument has never since unfolded better statement than in the words of Kepler:--"The day will soon break when pious simplicity will be ashamed of its blind superstition,--when men will recognize truth in the book of Nature as well as in the Holy Scriptures, and rejoice in the two revelations." [1]

[Footnote 1: _Harmonices Mundi._]

On this avowal he was branded as a hypocrite, heretic, and atheist.

To Mästlin he wrote:--"What is to be done? I think we should imitate the Pythagoreans, communicate our discoveries _privatim_, and be silent in public, that we may not die of hunger. The guardians of the Holy Scriptures make an elephant of a gnat. To avoid the hatred against novelty, I represented my discovery to the Rector of the University as a thing already observed by the ancients; but he made its antiquity a greater charge against it than he could have made of its novelty."

And, indeed, the devotion to truth in that age, as in others, required an heroic heart. Copernicus kept back the publication of his "De Revolutionibus Orbium Caeslestium" for thirty-six years, and received a copy of it only on his death-bed. Galileo tasted the sweets of the Inquisition. Tycho Brahe was exiled. And Kepler himself was persecuted all his life, hounded from city to city. And yet the sixteenth century will ever be memorable in the history of the human mind. The breaking down of external authority, the uprise of the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, and the splendid scientific conquests that came in consequence, inaugurated a mighty movement which separates the present promises of mankind from all past periods by an interval so vast as to make it not merely a great historical development, but the very birth of humanity. While Tycho Brahe, at the age of fifty-four, was making his memorable observations at Prague, Kepler, at the age of thirty, was applying his fiery mind to the determination of the orbit of Mars, and Galileo, at thirty-six, was bringing his telescope to the revelation of new celestial intervals and orbs. Within the succeeding century Huygens made the application of the pendulum to clocks; Napier invented Logarithms; Descartes and Galileo created the analysis of curves, and the science of Dynamics; Leibnitz brought the Differential Calculus; Newton decomposed a ray of light, and synthesized Kepler's Laws into the theory of Universal Gravitation.

Into this age, when the Old and New met face to face, came the questioning and quenchless spirit of Kepler. Born into an age of adventure, this new Prometheus, this heaven-scaler, matched it with an audacity to lift it to new reaches of realization.

A singular _naiveté_, too, marked this august soul. He has the frankness of Montaigne or Jean Jacques. He used to accuse himself of gabbling in mathematics,--"_in re mathematica loquax_,"--and claimed to speak with German freedom,--"_scripsi haec, homo Germanicus, more et libertate Germanica_." He marries far and near, brings planetary eclipses into conjunction with pecuniary penumbras, and his treatise on the perturbations of Mars reveals equal perturbations in his domestic economy. It may be to this candor, this _gemüth_, that we are to ascribe the powerful personal magnetism he exercises in common with Rousseau, Rabelais, and other rich and ingenuous natures. Who would be otherwise than frank, when frankness has this power to captivate? The excess of this influence appears in the warmth betrayed by writers over their favorite. The cool-headed Delambre, in his "Histoire de l'Astronomie," speaks of Kepler with the heat of a pamphleteer, and cannot repress a frequent sneer at his contemporary, Galileo. We know the splendor of the Newtonian synthesis; yet we do not find ourselves affected by Newton's character or discoveries. He touches us with the passionless love of a star.

Kepler puts the same _naiveté_ into his speculative activity, with a subtile anatomy laying bare the _metaphysique_ of his science. It was his habit to illumine his discoveries with an exhibition of the path that led to them, regarding the method as equally important with the result,--a principle that has acquired canonical authority in modern scientific research. "In what follows," writes he, introducing a long string of hypotheses, the fallacy of which he had already discovered, "let the reader pardon my credulity, whilst working out all these matters by my own ingenuity. For it is my opinion that the occasions by which men have acquired a knowledge of celestial phenomena are not less admirable than the discoveries themselves." His tentatives, failures, leadings, his glimpses and his glooms, those aberrations and guesses and gropings generally so scrupulously concealed, he exposes them all. From the first flashing of a discovery, through years of tireless toil, to when the glorious apparition emerges full-orbed and resplendent, we follow him, becoming party to the process, and sharing the ejaculations of exultation that leap to his lips. Seventeen years were required for the discovery of the harmonic law, that the squares of the times of the planetary revolutions are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances; and no tragedy ever equalled in affecting intensity the account he has written of those Promethean years. What rays does he let into the subtile paths where the spirit travels in its interrogations of Nature! We should say there was more of what there is of essential in metaphysics, more of the structural action of the human mind, in his books, than in the concerted introspection of all the psychologists. One sees very well that a new astronomy was predicted in the build of that sky-confronting mind; for harmonic ratios, laws, and rhymes played in his spheral soul, galaxies and gravitations stretched deeper within, and systems climbed their flaming ecliptic.

The highest problem of Science is the problem of Method. Hitherto man has worked on Nature only piecemeal. The understanding and the logic-faculty are allowed to usurp the rational and creative powers. One would say that scientists systematically shut themselves out of three-fourths of their minds, and the English have been insane on Induction these two hundred years. This unholy divorce has, as it always must do, brought poverty and impotence into the sciences, many of which stand apart, stand haggard and hostile, accumulations of incoherent facts, inhospitable, dead.

It is when contemplated in its historic bearings, as an education of the faculties of man, that the emphasis that has been placed on special scientific methods discloses its significance. The speculative synthesis of Greek and Alexandrine Science was a superb training in Deduction,--in the descent from consciousness to Nature. Abstracted from its relations with reality, the scholasticism of the Middle Ages pushed Deduction to mania and moonshine. Then it was, that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Occidental mind, astir under the oceanic movements of the modern, arose to break the spell of scholasticism that had fettered and frozen the intellect of man. An all-invading spirit of inquiry, analysis, skepticism, became rife. An unappeasable hunger for facts, facts, facts, took possession of the general intellect. It was felt that abstraction was disease, was death,--that speculation had to be vitalized and enriched from experience and experiment. This tendency was inevitable and sublime, no doubt. But it remains for modern times to emulate Nature and carry on analysis and synthesis at once. A great discovery is the birth of the whole soul in its creative activity. Induction becomes fruitful only when married to Deduction. It is those luminous intuitions that light along the path of discovery that give the eye and animus to generalization. Science must be open to influx and new beneficent affections and powers, and so add fleet wings to the mind in its exploration of Nature.

In Kepler was the perfect realization of the highest mission of Method. Powerfully deductive in the structure of his intellect, nourished on the divine bread of Plato and the Mystics, he yet united to these a Baconian breadth of practical power. Years before the publication of the "Novum Organum," he gave, in his "Commentaries on the Motions of Mars," a specimen of the logic of Induction whose circular sweep has never been matched. Prolific in the generation of hypotheses, he was yet remorseless in bringing them to the test of experiment. "Hypotheses which are not founded in Nature please me not," wrote he,--as Newton inscribed "_Hypotheses non fingo_" on the "Principia." Surely never was such heroic self-denial. Centurial vigils of baffling calculations --(remember, there was then little Algebra, and neither Calculus nor Logarithms)--were sacrificed without a regret except for the time expended, his tireless intellect pressing on to new heights of effort. His first work, the "Mysterium Cosmographicum," is the record of a splendid blunder that cost him five years' toil, and he spent ten years of fruitless and baffled effort in the deduction of the laws of areas and orbital ellipticity.