make its appearance in print. That Columbus was neglected and sometimes ridiculed during his stay with the Spanish court there can be but little doubt. That he was grieved and disheartened by the painful delay, no one can deny. At last, in 1491, the royal council, to whom the matter had been referred, reported that not until the end of the war with Granada would the king and queen give any further consideration to his project. Columbus had now waited more than five years, deluded by vain hopes. Why should he dally longer in Spain, where there was nothing for him but disappointment? He made up his mind to go to France, with the hope of prevailing upon the king of that country to lend him aid. While on his way to the seaport town of Huelva, for the purpose of taking ship, he stopped at the Convent of Rábida, near Palos. To the prior of the convent, Juan Perez de Marchena, he explained his projects. The prior listened and was convinced. He had been the queen's confessor, and he immediately wrote to her a letter so enthusiastic and so convincing that, in the end, both he and Columbus were summoned into her presence. Fortune had changed at last. The queen declared herself in favor of the enterprise. She would provide the ships and the men, and, as soon as the Moorish war should be ended, Columbus should set sail on his long-projected voyage to the west. The duration of the Moorish war was now only a question of days; and in January, 1492, it came to a close with the downfall and conquest of the city of Granada. Was the queen ready to provide the promised ships and men? Yes; but Columbus required more. He demanded the most extravagant rewards in case his expedition should prove to be successful; that he should be granted the rank and title of admiral; that he should be viceroy of all the lands he might discover; that his family should be raised to the nobility; that he should have a tenth part of all the gold, silver, spices and precious stones accruing to the royal revenue, and an eighth part of all the gain by conquest or by trade. These were extraordinary terms, and the queen refused to grant them. Columbus did not waver in his determination, nor abate one particle of his demands. For a sec * See E. B., Vol. XXII. 326; article," Spain." ond time he started for France; but, when only two leagues from Granada, where Isabella's court was then stopping, he was overtaken by a royal messenger. "Come back," was the word; "the queen has changed her mind; she will grant all that you ask." And so, on the 17th of April, 1492, the contract was completed and signed. Columbus had gained a victory greater than that which their Catholic majesties had obtained when Granada fell. A great deal has been said about the queen's offer to pawn her jewels to assist in defraying the expenses of the expedition. That the royal treasury had been exhausted during the Moorish war there can be no dispute, and that the queen's jewels were already pawned there is but little doubt. The cost of fitting out three small vessels was not very great even in those times. The entire amount was advanced by the queen's treasurer, Luis de Santangel. It was estimated at 1,140,000 Spanish maravedis, equivalent at the present time to $3,420, and at that time to perhaps four times as much certainly not a very enormous sum for the queen to risk on an expedition of this kind.* IX. At last the ships, the men and the necessary stores were ready; and on the 3d of August, 1492-on the very unluckiest day of the week-the little fleet set sail from the harbor of Palos. There were only three vessels, the Santa María, the Pinta and the Niña, and they carried, altogether, 120 men or, according to the historian, Las Casas, only ninety men. Two months and nine days from the date of departure, the adventurers, as we have already learned, astonished the natives of Guanahani by their unheralded arrival upon the shores of their little island. Columbus, when he planted his banner upon the beach, believed that he had reached one of the outlying islands of Southeastern Asia, the position of which was plainly delineated on the map that had been presented to him by Toscanelli, the Florentine geographer. "We have now arrived among the Indies," he said to his followers, and they gave to the guileless natives of the island the name of Indians. *See E. B., Vol. XXII. 326; article, "Spain." †See E. B., Vol. VI. 172; article, "Columbus." A STORY OF THE RAIN: WHAT IT DOES AND WHAT IT HAS DONE Y OU have often noticed how muddy the brooks become after a heavy rain. Their waters are discolored, as you know, by fine particles of sand and soil washed into them from the fields, the roads and the hillsides. Have you ever stopped to think that none of this material, stolen, so to say, by the rain, is ever brought back; that a good part of it is carried down and down until it reaches the sea?-and did you ever ask yourself what must be the consequence of this perpetual pilfering of the land by the rain? The face of a country must change, even though very slowly, under this incessant washing away of its soil. Its hills must be worn down; its valleys widened, its plains lowered. What is there to prevent the rain, if we give it time, from washing in the end a whole continent into the sea? You think of the rocks. Surely the firm and massive rocks must be able to withstand successfully the rain's assaults, even though the loose soil yields. This is not so certain. A portion of the rain which falls upon the rocks soaks into them, for even the hardest rocks are slightly porous. This of itself would do the rocks no harm, and they might still defy the rain were it not that the rain is able now to secure the help of a very mighty assistant-the frost. When water freezes and forms ice it swells. You know that a tumbler or a pitcher in which water is allowed to freeze is broken. In a small way the same thing happens to the rocks. The frosts of winter are forever nipping off little particles from their surfaces, which the spring rains can wash away. The rocks become "weathered," as we say. In fact, they are slowly crumbling to pieces. This is only one of the ways in which water can subdue the rocks. The river currents and the ocean waves can destroy them in another way, by grinding them together and thus slowly reducing them to sand or to clay. Evidence of this power of the water is given by every rolled and rounded pebble picked up from a riverbed or on a sea-beach. It takes a long time, no doubt, to grind up rocks in this way; but Nature has an abundance of time at her disposal. One of the most striking illustrations of the power of water as a rock-destroyer is afforded by the Niagara Falls. It has been calculated that 400,000 cubic feet of water pass over these falls every second. The upper portion of the bed-rock from which this enormous mass of water takes its mighty leap of 150 feet, is a layer of hard limestone, eighty or ninety feet in thickness. Under this layer is softer material, which is continually worn away by the action of the spray and of the frost. As a consequence the limestone rock is deprived of its support at its outer edge, and portions of it break off and tumble down from time to time, so that the falls are not absolutely fixed in their location, but are slowly moving up the river toward Lake Erie. Below the falls the river runs for seven miles through a gorge from 600 to 1,200 feet wide, the walls of which rise to a height of from 200 to 300 feet. There can be little doubt that this immense gorge has been dug out by the river itself. The mass of rock which has been removed to form it, pounded and ground to atoms by the water of the river, now lies, in the form of sand and mud, at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Even the rocks, then, although they may stand the wear and tear of the rain, and of the rivers produced by the rain, better than the loose soil, cannot hold out forever. Little by little they are being ground down into fine material-sand 460 and clay-and in this shape are carried to new localities, spread over lake bottoms or ocean beds. Will they, then, in the end, disappear entirely? Well, it looks that way. But instead of distressing ourselves with the prospect of so dire a calamity, which cannot, at any rate, befall for many millions of years, let us look backward and see what actually has happened in the long ages of the past. How many millions of years ago the earth began to have a solid crust-for undoubtedly there was a time when the earth was a molten, even a luminous body, like the sun-no one can say. The story of the rocks, which I am going to tell you, although the story must be told very briefly, will impress upon you forcibly the thought that it must have been many, very many, millions of years agoperhaps a hundred, very likely more than that. The earth's crust must at first, and, indeed, for ages, have been too hot for water to exist upon it. The waters which now form its seas and oceans must then have enveloped it in steaming clouds. But by and by, as the crust became cooler, these waters began to fall upon it in the form of rain; and such rains as there must have been in those ancient days! Finally the waters secured abiding-places upon the earth's surface, seeking, of course, the lower levels, and thus were formed the earth's primeval seas. And now begins a most astonishing story of the power of the rain-a story which, little by little, has been gathered from a study of the earth's rocks. We have seen that the rain is even now wearing away the continents. It has been engaged in this work of destruction from the day when it first began to fall, millions of years ago, and the result is something that would surpass belief, were not the evidence so clear that any one who will can read it. Geologists claim to know the character of the rocks to a depth of something like 10,000 feet, and they tell us that in all of this enormous mass of rock there is not a fragment of the earth's original crust left-that is to say, not a rock that, in the shape in which it now is, formed a part of that crust. Granite probably comes the nearest to being a primitive rock; but geologists believe that even granite consists of older material, which has been melted over, and has been poured out through openings in the crust and spread over the regions where we now find it. The earth's primeval contents have disappeared, washed by the rain, in the form of sand and clay, into the primeval seas, and from this material have been slowly formed new rocks-sandstones, and slates, and shales. The greater part of the rocks which now lie so near the surface that we can get at them to study them, are of this character. Sedimentary rocks they are called, because they have been formed of sediment, or settlings, deposited on the bottoms of lakes and seas. Other rocks which now enter largely into the earth's crust, are made up almost entirely of the remains of minute shellfish. Chalk and most limestones are of this character. These, of course, cannot have formed a part of the earth's original crust. You are already wondering, perhaps, how these rocks, which are said to have been formed beneath the waters of lakes and oceans-how they came where we now find them, frequently hundreds and even thousands of feet above the level of the sea. They have ceased to be oceanbeds, simply because, by some mighty force, acting from beneath, they have been pushed up until the water which covered them has flown off somewhere else. Other parts of the earth's crust were probably at the same time settling. There is, indeed, abundant evidence that this crust has from the beginning been subject to a slow undulation, and that many parts of it have been repeatedly above and beneath the sea. This story of the earth, in all its details, is a long story, and for one who likes to know the causes of the things he sees around him, it is full of interest. I have attempted here to give you only two of its main facts. The first is, that the most of the rocks with which we are acquainted were formed under water out of older rocks, which had been slowly ground up by the direct or the indirect action of the rain. When we consider the thickness of the combined layers of these rocks-nearly two miles-who will say that this is not an astonishing fact? The second is, that owing to a certain slow undulation or wave-like motion of the earth's crust, its various regions have been alternately land and sea. Where now is land, there certainly has at one time at more than one time-been ocean; and where now are oceans, there have doubtless been continents. Other parts of the story tell of the formation of mountains by the wrinkling of the earth's crust, and explain, too, why it is that we usually find the rock layers, which must have been originally pretty nearly level, tilted up and bent and twisted out of shape. A still more interesting part relates to fossils-the remains of vegetation and of animals which became imbedded in the rocks. We are not yet done with this story. But it is to be hoped that even what has been said here will lead you to take a little more notice of the rocks than you have, perhaps, heretofore taken, and will give you some ideas to work upon in your wonderment of how they grew.* WHAT IS A STAR? The ancients had very queer ideas about the stars. How could it be otherwise? They had not the slightest reason to suppose that the stars were so far away as we now know them to be. They imagined, too, that they were all at pretty nearly the same distance from the earth, and that the starry firmament was actually a huge, hollow sphere, with the earth at its center, just as it appears to be. The earth was, for them, the principal body in the universe, and all else was dependent on it. The sun moved round the earth even the great sphere of the heavens, with its host of stars, moved round the earth. How could these stars, then, be looked upon as bodies of any very great size or of great importance, except as they beautified the heavens and delighted the eyes of its inhab *The article on "Geology" in the Encyclopædia (Vol. X. 212-375) tells the whole story of the earth's crust, and although, as a whole, it is hardly suited to young readers, there are many parts of it which I think you will find interesting. To begin with, the illustrations: Look on pages 298-301 for pictures showing the inclination and the curvature of rocks. See how the different kinds of rocks overlay one another, and how they are bent up and twisted out of shape. Read what is said about the Solid Globe (222), Composition of the Earth's Crust (237), Volcanoes (240), and on Movements of Upheaval and Depression (255). Of itants, and, perhaps, exercised some influence over the destinies of men? course, philosophers wondered what these little sparkling points of light were, and the opinion which seems to have found the most favor was that they were fires of a very ethereal sort, which were fed and kept aglow by certain "effluvia," or, as we would now say, gases, that were exhaled by the earth, and rose, by reason of their lightness, until they reached the high "empyrean," or sphere of fire. We now know that this ancient view of the great importance of the earth was all wrong. We have learned that the earth is only a little planet, and that the sun, which formerly was supposed to revolve around it, is really the central body, and is of vastly greater size than the earth -more than a million times as great. This great truth was not discovered all at once. Even Copernicus, the author of the modern and true system of astronomy, had no idea how vast a body the sun is, nor how far away it is. But he was right in his opinion that the earth revolves about it, and the discovery of this fact alone made a very great change in the views of astronomers regarding the stars. They saw that these stars must be vastly more remote from us than had ever before been suspected, and they were not long in reaching the conclusion that they are actually suns, and that the feebleness of their light is only because of their enormous distance from us. Not only are the stars suns, but since it has become possible to estimate pretty nearly their distances, the truth has been brought out that many of them are of vastly greater size than our own sun. Indeed, our sun seems to hold a rather inferior rank among the celestial bodies. There are probably very few of the stars which we can see with the naked eye which do not exceed the sun in size, some of them very greatly. But have we answered fully the question, What is a star, when we have said that a star is a distant sun? Who knows what a sun is, and are all suns alike, except as to size? There is no end to questions of this sort, when once they are started. Astronomers do not pretend to be able to answer these questions fully, but within the past thirty years they have been able to gather a great deal of surprising and interesting information bearing upon these questions. I say surprising, because the facts which they have learned are of a sort which, before the invention of the wonderful little instrument called the spectroscope, no one could have dreamed it possible to obtain. I wish it were easy to tell you what the spectroscope is and how it does its work. But I fear the story would be a little difficult to make quite clear. I will only say here that it has the power of breaking up and sifting, so to say, the light of the sun or of a star or of any other shining body, and thus revealing to a practiced eye something of the nature of the body from which the light has come. It can tell, for example, whether the body is solid or gaseous; and it can tell something about its temperature; whether it is exceedingly hot or only moderately hot. This is what the spectroscope has told us about the stars. A very large number of the stars, it tells us nearly one-half-resemble the sun very closely, although few of them resemble it exactly. They are, like the sun, intensely hot bodies. Probably they are enormous masses of densely compressed gases. In their upper regions float clouds, of which the droplets, instead of being of water, as are those of our terrestrial clouds, are of molten metal; or, as some astronomers think, they are glowing particles of carbon. Above this "photosphere," as this dazzling cloud envelope is called, is an atmosphere in which float gases that are comparatively cool and the vapors of metals. In the atmosphere of the sun all of the more important of the " elements," as chemists say -iron, copper, aluminum, sodium, manganese, hydrogen, etc.-are known to exist, and a very large number of them are found to be present also in the stars. These sun-like stars may be known by their yellow color. Another class of stars, fully as numer QUESTION DEPARTMENT ous as these, shine with a bluish-white light. Sirius, the brilliant Dog Star, is a good example of this class. These stars are thought to be even hotter than the "solar," or yellow stars. They are most certainly gaseous, and they are probably more distended by heat than is the sun, and are not nearly so heavy, bulk for bulk, as are stars of the solar type. Then there are very many stars which have a decidedly reddish color. These are generally thought to be suns which have cooled down to a temperature much below that of our sun. They are approaching extinction as luminaries. There are still other stars which some astronomers think are simply dense clouds of meteors-small bodies which congregate in vast shoals or swarms, and which are in rapid motion among themselves. These meteors are supposed to be continually clashing together, producing by their hard knocks against one another heat and light-"striking fire," as we say. The astronomers who hold this opinion believe that these meteoric masses are slowly condensing, and are becoming hotter, as well as more compact, and that some day they will become suns, although this is not their character now. This question of the nature of the stars is one of the most interesting of the questions to which astronomers are now trying to find an answer. They have as yet only made a beginning; but as you see from what has just been said, they have already found out that, whatever the stars are, they are not all alike. It is considered as most likely that they are in different stages of formation or of world-life, or to state the case a little differently, that the work of creating worlds is still going on before our very eyes, although so slowly that the entire life of the human race may be a period too short for any very great changes to take place among these celestial bodies. OF THE HOME UNIVERSITY LEAGUE T HE answers to the questions for October will be found in Volume XIX. of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Usually the page given is the one on which the article begins, as it is assumed that the private student will wish to read it in its entirety. Not infrequently in the body of an article will be found references to other volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Oct. 1. Viewing at this distance of time the vast theatre of the second Earl of Chatham's |