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MEASURING
THE COSMOS
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PREVIOUS BOOKS BY DAVID H. CLARK
The Historical Supernovae(with F. R. Stephenson)
Applications of Historical Astronomical Records
(with F. R. Stephenson)
Superstars
The Quest for SS433
The Cosmos from Space
Aliens: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(with Andrew J. H. Clark)
Newton’s Tyranny(with Stephen P. H. Clark)
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MEASURING
THE COSMOS
How Scientists Discovered
the Dimensions of the Universe
DAVID H. CLARK and
MATTHEW D. H. CLARK
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Brunswick, New Jersey,
and London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Measuring the cosmos : how scientists discovered the dimensions of the
universe / David H. Clark and Matthew D.H. Clark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-3404-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cosmology—Research. I. Clark, David H.
II. Clark, Matthew D. H., 1970 –
QB981.M385 2004
523.1— dc22
2003020096
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Copyright © 2004 by David H. Clark and Matthew D. H. Clark
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue,
Piscataway, NJ 08854 – 8099. The only exception to this prohibition
is “fair use” as deﬁned by U.S. copyright law.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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To David Samuel, Marcus Alexander, and Peter James
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Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Prologue
A Rapid Journey through Time and Space 1
Chapter 1
Ingenious Visions 9
Chapter 2
Serious Measurements 36
Chapter 3
The Great Debate 62
Chapter 4
Seeing Red 91
Chapter 5
The Nature of Creation 123
Chapter 6
Living with Inﬂation 156
Glossary 183
Bibliography 195
Index 197
CONTENTS
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This book tells the stories of “heroes” and “heroines,” both well
known and unsung, behind the present understanding of the ori-
gin, size, and age of the cosmos. Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein,
Fred Hoyle—these are household names. But how many people,
other than professional astronomers, have heard of scientists like
Heber Curtis, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, Mil-
ton Humason, or Vesto Slipher? Our current understanding of
the nature of the universe depends on all of them, not just the fa-
mous few.
Nor was the path to contemporary knowledge a well-ordered
progression from ignorance to understanding. Along the way,
astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists made mistakes, faced
impenetrable uncertainties, and found plenty of time to ﬁght
within their ranks. The stories of the scientists involved in measur-
ing the cosmos reveal ambitions, conﬂicts, failures, as well as suc-
cesses as the astonishing scale and age of the universe were ﬁnally
established. Few areas of scientiﬁc research have witnessed the likes
of the clashes of egos, the claims and counterclaims of priority of
thought, or the failed (or falsiﬁed) theories and observations that
resulted from attempts to measure the universe. The ancient Greeks
used the word cosmos to describe the observable heavens. The
word cosmos means order and hierarchy (and is the opposite of
chaos). Not only the universe, but also the emergence of a true un-
derstanding of its complexity, would prove to be more chaotic than
the Greek scholars could ever have imagined for a system they be-
lieved to be perfect and well ordered.
ix
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The story that follows gives overdue credit to some of the little-
known individuals who played a key role in the race to measure the
cosmos.
We wish to thank our agent, Al Zuckerman of Writers House,
and our editor, Audra Wolfe, for their helpful guidance and advice.
The suggestion to write a book on measuring the cosmos came
from John Michel, and we are grateful for his guidance during the
formative stage of the project. Suzanne Clark and Agnes Clark pro-
vided much valued research assistance. We are enormously grate-
ful to all the members of our family for their support and tolerance
during the long hours of writing.
David Clark and Matthew Clark, July 2003
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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MEASURING
THE COSMOS
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1
Prologue
A RAPID JOURNEY THROUGH
TIME AND SPACE
Humans have always viewed
the heavens with wonder and with awe, sensing, as they looked out
into the night sky, the vastness of space, the power of the creation,
and perhaps even something of their own origins. The importance
of the heavens in the lives of primitive peoples is demonstrated
by depictions of the Sun and stars in cave paintings and on ancient
monuments, the emergence of Sun and Moon worship, the devel-
opment of simple calendars based on the changing patterns of the
skies, the use of the stars for navigation, and the development of
astrology.
Classical civilizations sought an improved understanding of the
changing patterns in the heavens through logic. Thales of Miletus
in the sixth century b.c.e.was the ﬁrst to explain natural phenom-
ena through philosophical reason, correctly predicting the occur-
rence of a solar eclipse. Anaximander, one of Thales’ most noted
successors from Miletus, introduced the notion of the “inﬁnite”—
a universe that was inﬁnite in time and space, with things being
brought into being and passing away. In modern times Anaximan-
der’s notion would reemerge as the so-called steady state theory of
the universe. By contrast the philosopher Anaxagoras believed that
at some time “all things were together,” an idea that would be pre-
sented in the twentieth century as the big bang theory for the ori-
gin of the universe. Thus the ancient forebears of modern cosmol-
ogists were already grappling with the issues of the scale and origin
of the cosmos.
Aristotle forged the notion of a perfect universe centered on
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the Earth. Prior to Aristotle it was argued that everything of com-
mon experience could be explained in terms of the four “ele-
ments”: earth, ﬁre, air, and water. Aristotle introduced a ﬁfth per-
fect “element,” the so-called quintessence, to explain what he
perceived as the perfect nature of things in the heavens. The last of
the great Greek astronomers was Claudius Ptolemy. His famous
work The Great Synthesis, commonly called the Almagest, presented
formally the accepted astronomical theories of the day based on a
universe that had the Earth at its center around which the Sun,
planets, and stars revolved. The impact of the Almagestwas truly as-
tounding. The Earth-centered model of the universe remained es-
sentially intact through the dark ages of intellectual stagnation fol-
lowing the collapse of the Greco-Roman culture. By the twelfth
century Ptolemy’s teachings, based on thinking of a millennium
earlier, formed a cornerstone of the religious dogma of the Church
of Rome. Questioning the Ptolemaic doctrine became tantamount
to heresy.
The ﬁrst serious alternative to the Ptolemaic theory appeared
when the Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus published his theory
of a Sun-centered system in the monumental treatise De revolution-
ibus orbium coelestium(On the Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies)
shortly before he died in 1543. Copernicus proposed that the Earth
and other planets orbited the Sun rather than everything in the
heavens orbiting the Earth. In fact the Greek philosopher Aristar-
chus had argued for a heliocentric cosmos in the third century
b.c.e., but his thesis had not prevailed. Copernicus’s ideas were to
rock human understanding and challenge the infallibility of papal
doctrine in the century to follow. The very word revolution, when
applied to the violent overthrow of an existing system, has its ori-
gins in the treatise.
Although Copernicus initiated the revolution in human under-
standing of the universe, it has been only through the scientiﬁc ad-
vances of the past 150 years that people could gain a real apprecia-
tion of its true enormousness, its cataclysmic origin billions of years
ago, or their own close relationship to the stars. The historical pic-
ture, dominated in the West initially by the philosophies of Greek
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scholars and subsequently by Christian teachings, changed dramat-
ically as scientists ﬁnally learned how to estimate the incredible dis-
tances to cosmic objects with some certainty. As a consequence we
are now closer to a true appreciation of the vastness of the universe,
its cataclysmic origin, and its likely fate. The vision of the heavens
imagined by some of the ancients, an inﬁnite cosmos populated
with a myriad of Sun-like stars, turns out to be closer to reality than
the overly constrained view that pertained for almost two thousand
years up to the past century. The scope of present-day investigation
extends from speculation about the origin of the universe, to study-
ing its present turbulent state, to thinking about its ultimate fate. It
extends from Earth’s nearest and comparatively well-understood
stellar neighbors to bizarre and enigmatic objects at the extremities
of an observable universe that is in a state of constant and violent
upheaval.
It might be considered a somewhat strange detective novel that
revealed brieﬂy in its early pages the resolution of a murder mys-
tery, before then proceeding to describe the nature of the crime
and the gathering of evidence needed to solve it. Nevertheless that
is the approach to be adopted here. We will start by describing the
scale and age of the cosmos as revealed by modern research, before
looking in the chapters that follow at how scientists developed an
appreciation of its true enormity by establishing methods to mea-
sure the distances to the stars and galaxies, and thence estimating
the likely age of the universe.
Stars are not uniformly scattered throughout the cosmos but ac-
cumulate in vast conglomerates called galaxies. Our Sun is just one
of an estimated 400 billion stars within our galaxy, which since an-
tiquity has been called the Milky Way because of its white cloudy
appearance running across the night sky. The Milky Way turns out
to be discus shaped (we are seeing it from within), with our Sun
occupying a rather insigniﬁcant location closer to its periphery
than to its heart. The Milky Way appears at its most spectacular
when viewed from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, where one is
looking toward the Galaxy’s center. Within the Milky Way we ﬁnd
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clusters of millions of stars closely packed together, embedded in a
more systematic distribution of stars.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, drawing on an idea
of the British astronomer Thomas Wright, speculated in his work
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavensin 1775 that there
were numerous other Milky Ways—accumulations of stars that he
referred to as “island universes.” However, his idea was largely ig-
nored, and until 1924 many scientists believed that the universe did
not extend beyond the Milky Way. How mistaken our scientiﬁc
forebears were! If our place within the Milky Way seems insig-
niﬁcant, then it is now appreciated that within the overall universe
the place of the Milky Way itself is similarly insigniﬁcant. Modern
astronomical techniques have now revealed that the observable
universe contains vast numbers of galaxies.
It was one of the great feats of astronomy to learn how to deter-
mine the distances of the stars. Now that we have some idea of the
universe’s enormous size, we ﬁnd that familiar units of distance—
such as mile or kilometer—don’t begin to capture its scale. Instead
we use a unit of distance called the light-year, the distance a pulse
of light travels in one year. Since the speed of light is a stagger-
ing 300,000 kilometers each second, a light-year is a considerable
distance. The Sun is eight light-minutes away; sunlight illuminat-
ing Earth left the Sun eight minutes ago. The outer planets are
light-hours away. We now know that the nearest star to the Sun is
about ﬁve light-years away, while the more distant stars we see
in the night sky with the naked eye are many thousands of light-
years away.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. Nearby galaxies are
then millions of light-years distant. These can sometime be found
in “groups” several million light-years across containing dozens
of galaxies, and there are “clusters” tens of millions of light-years
across that contain thousands of individual galaxies. These all form
“superclusters” hundreds of millions of light-years across. The clus-
ters and superclusters have a connecting structure like tangled spa-
ghetti around giant voids, or perhaps like a Swiss cheese. The uni-
verse probably contains on the order of 100 billion galaxies. Current
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understanding suggests that very distant galaxies are at distances of
billions of light-years. On the universal scale, planet Earth must be
considered to be no more than a mere speck of cosmic sand swept
by the tides of universal change.
The process for estimating cosmic distances involves a series of
steps and methods as we move out from planet Earth. Imagine that
we have a ruler marked in inches and feet for measuring features
around the home. We then use this ruler to calibrate one marked
in feet and yards to measure room sizes—and then we use the yard
ruler to calibrate to one marked in tens of yards to measure dis-
tances around the garden—and thence continue to one marked
in miles to measure distances around the countryside. If we did
not have the inches and feet on our ﬁrst ruler accurately marked,
then the subsequent calibration of rulers for larger scales would be
wrong. It is the same with measuring cosmic distances; as we move
farther and farther out into the cosmos using complementary tech-
niques to estimate distance, it is important to check the calibration
of overlaying methods of measurement. Although there has been
ample investment of intellectual effort and generous funding, the
task is not easy and has required a monumental effort on the part
of the scientists involved. Many of the surveys required years of
observation, and in some cases researchers devoted their whole
careers to trying to perfect a single distance-measuring technique.
The ﬁrst step in measuring cosmic distances is by the process
known as parallax. A simple illustration of parallax is to hold a
ﬁnger upright at arm’s length. First view the ﬁnger with your left
eye closed—and then with your right eye closed. The ﬁnger will
appear to have moved with respect to background objects, despite
its having been held stationary. Similarly if a star fairly close to Earth
is observed six months apart, when Earth is on opposite sides of its
orbit around the Sun, then the star will appear to have shifted posi-
tion with respect to more distant “background” stars. Copernicus
and others realized that a consequence of his theory that Earth or-
bited the Sun must be that stars would display parallax. The fact that
parallax could not be detected with the best measuring instruments
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they had available implied that the stars must be at unimaginable
distances.
Return for a moment to the experiment with a ﬁnger held at
arm’s length, and imagine that with your right eye closed the ﬁnger
is aligned exactly with a distant object. Now with your left eye
closed it is no longer aligned with the distant object, since it is be-
ing viewed from a slightly different position. The angle of dis-
placement can be estimated. If you know the distance between your
eyes, you can use a method known as triangulation to estimate the
distance to your ﬁnger. Since antiquity, triangulation has been the
standard method used by surveyors to estimate the distance to re-
mote objects. First the direction to a remote object is determined
from one position. (This can be the compass direction.) Then the
direction is determined from another position a known distance
from the ﬁrst. Triangulation then gives the distance to the remote
object using the difference in direction (an angle), the distance be-
tween the two places of observation, and simple trigonometry.
Triangulation can, for example, be used to estimate the distance
to the Moon. Suppose the position of the Moon with respect to
the background stars is measured at two points widely spaced on
Earth’s surface at a prearranged time. By knowing the distance be-
tween the two observing points, one can triangulate to get the dis-
tance to the Moon as about thirty times Earth’s diameter.
The ﬁrst person to successfully measure the distance to a star
from its parallax was Friedrich Bessel, the director of the Konigs-
berg Observatory in Germany. Bessel started his search for stars ex-
hibiting parallax in 1837 with a binary star system in the constella-
tion of Cygnus. He calculated its distance to be eleven light-years,
considered a staggering distance at the time.
By 1878 only seventeen stars had parallax distances determined;
such was the difﬁculty in making the measurements. Indeed, even
by 1900 fewer than one hundred stellar distance measurements had
been obtained. But in 1903 Frank Schlesinger introduced the tech-
nique of photography to parallax measurement, enabling the
method to be extended to estimating the distances of the several
thousand stars closest to the Sun. The distances determined, many
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tens of light-years, were now extending the bounds of human un-
derstanding. But this was merely a modest ﬁrst step!
In looking out into the cosmos through a telescope, one is look-
ing not only deep into space but also back in time. Thus the nearby
stars are viewed as they were several years ago, and more distant
stars within the Milky Way as they were thousands of years ago,
when the light now reaching Earth began its cosmic journey. The
nearby galaxies appear as they were millions of years ago, and the
more distant galaxies as they were hundreds of millions or even bil-
lions of years ago. Few of the objects we now observe still exist (at
this instant) in the form we presently see them, and some may no
longer even exist. Thus the history of the universe is laid out for
Earthbound heaven gazers to contemplate. The telescope repre-
sents a “time machine” in which we can study stars and galaxies
at various stages of their evolution: nascent stars procreated from
giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust; young stars, old stars, dy-
ing stars, and dead stars; young galaxies, interacting galaxies, and
galaxies being torn apart. The universe reveals itself to be a spec-
tacle of unfolding drama as stars and star systems are born and die,
often violently.
We must adjust our terrestrial scale of thinking if we are to ap-
preciate the masses and timescales involved in describing the uni-
verse. We choose to measure the mass of objects of common expe-
rience in terms of a convenient standard mass, the kilogram. Thus,
for example, an adult male may have a mass of about 80 kilograms.
The mass of planet Earth is 6 million billion billion kilograms! The
Sun is some 300,000 times more massive than Earth. The mass
of the Milky Way is probably at least 100 billion times that of the
Sun! And the mass of the universe is certainly greater (perhaps
much greater) than 1,000 billion billion solar masses. No less of a
challenge to the human imagination are the timescales involved in
describing astronomical phenomena. Earthbound events are con-
veniently measured in terms of the sidereal year; the time for Earth
to complete one orbit about the Sun, measured relative to the ﬁxed
stars. The Sun and other stars orbit around the center of the Milky
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Way. At the Sun’s distance from the Milky Way’s center, the stars
take over 200 million years to complete one revolution. The Sun
is believed to be some 5 billion years old; and will survive for a sim-
ilar period. The Milky Way is probably some 8 to 10 billion years
old. The universe itself is thought to be at least some 13 to 14 bil-
lions years old.
Such vast times and distances would have shocked astronomers
from the ancient and early modern worlds. Building on the tra-
ditions of ancient Greeks and Babylonians, Renaissance and early
modern astronomers developed a complex set of theories about
the nature of the universe. Their ideas about the relationship of the
Earth to the heavens had important consequences for religion, pol-
itics, commerce, and exploration. Our story therefore rightly be-
gins with a survey of astronomical knowledge from the sixth cen-
turyb.c.e.to the mid–nineteenth century. But despite the dramatic
advances made in over two millennia of scientiﬁc observation,
nineteenth-century astronomers still lacked concrete evidence for
the true dimensions of the cosmos.
Since the nineteenth century, science has moved in just one hun-
dred years from a position of almost total ignorance about the ac-
tual distances to the stars, and about the nature and distances of
galaxies, to our present knowledge of the enormous size, mass, and
age of the universe. We are reaching the limits of observation, and
therefore the limits of human understanding. Beyond lies only our
imagination, seeded by the inspiration of the theories of physics.
But the race to measure the cosmos goes on.
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9
Chapter 1
INGENIOUS VISIONS
Astronomy owes its heritage
to many historical strands, foremost among them being the studies
of the heavens by the ancient Babylonians, the Chinese and other
Far Eastern cultures, the early Egyptians, and the Mesoamerican
civilizations. It was the ancient Greeks, however, who set in place
a vision of the cosmos that inﬂuenced European thinking until the
Renaissance. The ancient Greek thinkers are the natural ancestors
of current cosmologists, hence the attention that we give to them
here. Their studies would impact human understanding of the size
and nature of the cosmos for almost two millennia, and their phi-
losophy and observational creativity remain a source of fascination.
Ancient Greek tradition saw the Earth as a ﬂat disk, with the
heavens as a dome encompassing the disk. The stars were ﬁxed to
the dome. But some celestial objects were found to wander among
the ﬁxed stars: they were called the planets (the “wandering stars”).
The ancient cosmological worldview was dominated by beliefs
about the gods. This applied especially to the great “why?” ques-
tions. When any wise man or woman of an ancient tribe was asked
a question such as “Why does the rain fall?” he or she would an-
swer with some myth—perhaps explaining how the rain was the
result of the will of the sky god and his gift to humankind. Myths
were handed down from generation to generation, although there
was ample freedom for the embellishment of old myths and the
creation of new ones. Modern anthropologists believe that human-
ity began using such myths at the time of the ancient cave paint-
ings, and that these myths were the motivation behind the devel-
opment of art and much else of ancient culture. Such “why” myths
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have had a great inﬂuence on human development, but their fun-
damental weakness was that they lacked the power of prediction. A
solar eclipse may be explained as the grief of the Sun god. How-
ever, this makes the phenomenon unpredictable—and remote
from human experience. In 585b.c.e.the Greek astronomer Thales
of Miletus forever changed human experience by correctly pre-
dicting the date of a solar eclipse. Thus the ancient Greeks were
presented with two different explanations of this event, one myth-
ological and the other scientiﬁc. While the mythmakers had cen-
turies of tradition on their side, only Thales had the power of
prediction.
Greek astronomical research dates back well before Thales, and
Thales himself must have relied on calculations produced by the
Babylonians, who were gifted observers of the heavens. In fact
Thales of Miletus got very lucky. If his calculations were indeed
based on the Babylonian method, he would have been able to pre-
dict accurately lunar, but not solar, eclipses. He was particularly
fortunate that the eclipse of 585 b.c.e.was total as viewed from the
scene of a reasonably signiﬁcant battle between the Lydians and the
Persians. And he was lucky that the ﬁrst Greek historian, Hero-
dotus, recorded his prediction for prosperity.
The war [between the Lydians and the Persians] was equally
balanced, until in the sixth year an engagement took place in
which, after battle had been joined, the day suddenly turned
to night. This change in the day had been foretold to the Io-
nians by Thales of Miletus, who had ﬁxed as its term the very
year in which it actually occurred.
Despite his good fortune, only the mean-spirited would wish to
rob Thales of his scientiﬁc immortality. His dramatic prediction
demonstrated the value of systematic measurement of the heavens,
and it places Thales at the beginning of the story of astronomical
prediction.
Another great contribution that Thales made to the history of
science is that he was the ﬁrst Greek philosopher that we know to
have referred to the concept of “an element.” Certainly he is at the
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start of the tradition of the search for the underlying substance of
all matter, which led in time to the practice of alchemy in the
Middle Ages—and would lead to the production of the periodic
table when the falsehoods of alchemy were eventually replaced by
the scientiﬁc method. Thales’ imagination led him to propose that
the underlying substance of the whole cosmos was water. He be-
lieved that the Earth had been produced by the condensation of
water and the air had been produced from water by rarefaction.
Thales was a citizen of the city of Miletus, and one estimate of
his life is 624 –547 b.c.e.In fact, the ﬁrst three famous Greek phi-
losophers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, all came from
Miletus, and the location and circumstances of the city were very
signiﬁcant to the birth of some of the fundamental concepts of
science.
Miletus was in modern-day Turkey, on the coast of the Aegean
Sea. Not far north was Ephesus, home of the Temple of Artemis,
one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Within a few miles
to the south was Didyma, the site of one of the major oracles of the
Greek world, and farther south was Halicarnassus, the home city of
Herodotus, the ﬁrst historian. The area was a crucible of philo-
sophical reasoning.
What was particularly important about Miletus, from the point
of view of our story, is that the city was open to ideas from the East,
and in particular from Babylon. Although Babylon has been re-
membered in folklore for its immorality (based on its widespread
ritual prostitution in honor of the goddess Ishtar), it should perhaps
be more charitably remembered for its contributions to the origins
of astronomy. Hundreds of years before Thales, the Babylonians
had plotted the background stars to the setting Sun. Clearly iden-
tiﬁable groups of stars were known as constellations, and myths and
legends were assigned to them. The constellations through which
the path of the Sun passed were noted. This path deﬁned what
was called the zodiac, which the Babylonians divided into twelve
“signs” of 30 degrees each. The signs of the zodiac took on partic-
ular signiﬁcance in prognostication. It supposedly made a differ-
ence to the ancient diviners which sign of the zodiac one was born
under (an ancient myth that is fed to a gullible public to this day by
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the tabloid press). The Roman historian Pliny records that Cleo-
stratus of Tenedos, a Greek, recognized the signs of the zodiac.
Modern scholars have placed Cleostratus to the second half of the
sixth century b.c.e.and have speculated that he learned from the
Babylonians about the signs of the zodiac and about some of
the constellations the Babylonians had deﬁned by star patterns.
The Babylonians had also discovered the lunar cycle of 223 lunar
months, which Thales must have learned about and used as the ba-
sis of his eclipse prediction.
The Babylonians might have been able to describe “what” and
predict “when.” But Thales’ achievement, with his fellow Greek
philosophers, was to ask the question “why?” It was the transition
in reason from “what” and “when” to “why” that set the Greek
cultures above all others—even before their contributions to art,
music, literature, democracy, and architecture are acknowledged.
Although we have no evidence for Thales’ view on the size of
the cosmos, we do know that he applied his view about what the
cosmos was made of to its structure. In On the Heavens, Aristotle
attributes to Thales the view that the Earth ﬂoats on water like a
log in a stream. Simplicius, a much later commentator on Aristotle
(who, writing in the sixth century c.e., is one of the most im-
portant sources of information on the early Greek cosmologists),
suggested that Thales had derived his cosmological beliefs from
knowledge of ancient Egyptian mythology. This has received some
support from modern scholars of Egyptian beliefs. Certainly Thales’
beliefs ﬁt into the wider pattern of cosmological ideas put forward
in this period by the civilizations of the Middle East, such as the
Hebrews and the Babylonians. However, Thales inspired succes-
sors, who continued to speculate about the visible world based on
their own observations. It was his belief in the possibility of rational
explanation of complex visible phenomena that makes Thales such
a giant in the history of natural science.
Of all the ancient natural philosophers, Anaximander is the one
who most naturally falls into a chapter titled “Ingenious Visions.”
Anaximander also lived in Miletus, and the historical tradition re-
cords that he was a pupil of Thales. Certainly there are obvious
links between the ideas attributed to both men. The dates suggested
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for Anaximander’s life are 611–546 b.c.e.Unlike Thales, Anaxi-
mander is recorded as having written a book, titled On Nature.
Book writing was rare even by the time of Aristotle and Theo-
phrastus in the fourth century b.c.e.Tragically Anaximander’s
work, although referenced much later, was subsequently lost. An-
aximander appears to have written many cosmological theories in
his book On Nature, but we have to rely on secondary sources, such
as the Christian apologist and historian of philosophy Hippolytus
(180 –235 c.e.), to reconstruct them.
Like Thales, who believed that water formed the underlying
substance of the whole cosmos, Anaximander speculated on the ul-
timate form of matter. In fact the much later historian of philoso-
phy Simplicius mentions the tradition that Anaximander was the
ﬁrst writer to use the word arche(to describe the underlying ele-
ment). However, rather than identifying any common substance
such as water as the underlying element or principle, Anaximander
argued that the basic material was the “inﬁnite,” or the unlimited.
He seems to have been struck by the thought that the underlying
element must be inﬁnite, so that the processes of coming into be-
ing and passing away would be inﬁnite. Plato applies Anaximan-
der’s concept of the inﬁnite to souls in the Phaedoto argue for the
immortality of the soul.
Since Anaximander believed that the underlying principle was
inﬁnite, it is natural to think that he believed the size of the uni-
verse to be potentially inﬁnite. (Over two millennia later cosmol-
ogists would still be grappling with the concept of an “inﬁnite”
universe.) Certainly Anaximander’s vision of the cosmos and the
heavenly bodies was dramatic and extensive. Of all the ancient
thinkers, he seems to have come the nearest to imagining the vast
size of the universe.
Hippolytus gives a detailed account of Anaximander’s ingenious
celestial system. The ﬁrst principle of things is the inﬁnite nature,
from which the heavens and Earth are created. Just as the principle
substance had to be inﬁnite, so he believed that there had to be
eternal motion to explain the balancing process of coming into be-
ing and passing away.
Anaximander developed an imaginative theory to explain the
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creation of the Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars. He believed that part
of the inﬁnite became separated into two opposites, the hot and the
cold. The hot section developed into a sphere of ﬂame. Various
portions then broke off and were surrounded by rings of com-
pressed air. These rings contained “breathing holes,” which al-
lowed the emission of ﬁre and light. Eclipses occurred when these
breathing holes became blocked. The imagination behind these
speculations was as breathtaking for the ancient Greeks as it appears
to be simplistic and nonsensical to us. However, Anaximander ap-
pears to be the ﬁrst thinker to analyze the objects we observe in the
sky in natural terms, and to try to explain in a systematic way how
we see them—even if to our modern way of thinking his specula-
tions appear somewhat picturesque.
Anaximander was not afraid to jettison the theories of his men-
tor, Thales. Instead of Thales’ theory of the Earth ﬂoating in wa-
ter, he believed that the Earth was not supported by any physi-
cal body but remained in place because it was equidistant from all
other heavenly bodies. It is natural to assume that this argument
presupposed some primitive theory of gravity, whereby the cosmic
objects exerted balancing forces on the Earth. He believed that the
Earth itself was a short cylinder and that the depth of the cylinder
was one-third of its breadth. Living things existed on one of the
faces of the cylinder. He also speculated about the distance be-
tween the Earth and the observable cosmic bodies. This is the ear-
liest estimate we know about of the distances within the cosmos.
He calculated the Moon’s distance to be nineteen times the radius
of the plane face of the Earth and the Sun’s distance to be twenty-
eight times the same radius (the former is short by a factor three,
and the latter is short by a spectacular margin).
After all this theory, it is a relief to hear that Anaximander had
some practical accomplishments, although we know almost noth-
ing about his life. He was recorded as the ﬁrst person to attempt to
draw a map of the whole Earth. Hecateus, also of Miletus, later re-
vised this map, and we know that by the time of the Ionian revolt
in 499– 493 b.c.e.mapmaking was well advanced in Greek Asia
Minor. He is also recorded to have traveled to Sparta and to have
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set up a sundial recording the solstices, the time, the seasons, and
the equinox.
Of course the natural modern response to Anaximander’s won-
derful visions is to ask what evidence he based these visions on, and
of course we do not know. Present sources are summaries of sum-
maries, aiming merely to list his beliefs concisely and dramatically.
The arguments and fragments of argument attributed to Anaxi-
mander that we do have seem to suggest that he was more inclined
than Thales to reason from ﬁrst principles, rather than to base
his beliefs merely on observation. What is indisputably important
about his speculation, however, is that he tried to explain what
he saw in the heavens and on Earth purely in natural terms rather
than assigning causation to the gods. And there are uncanny echoes
from some of Anaximander’s theories in those which have evolved
in modern science, such as the creation of the solar system from a
collapsing cloud of hot gas (“ball of ﬁre”), the continual balancing
processes of coming into being and passing away applied to cos-
mic objects, and the theory of balancing attracting forces between
large bodies (gravity). These must be seen as real triumphs of the
human intellect, even if generations of scientists would be needed
before picturesque speculations could be turned into valid scien-
tiﬁc hypotheses.
The third great natural philosopher from Miletus is Anaximenes,
who lived from around 585 to 528 b.c.e.He was an associate of
Anaximander, and thus the line of intellectual succession is contin-
ued. Anaximenes’ astronomical theories, and indeed his general
line of thought, seem closely related to Anaximander’s ideas. Dio-
genes Laertius, writing in the third century c.e., contrasts Anaxi-
menes’ “simple and economical Ionian style” with Anaximander’s
somewhat poetical words. This suggests that Anaximenes’ writings
survived to the Christian period but not much beyond. Aristotle
discusses Anaximenes’ astronomical views, and our evidence is
supplemented by the Christian writer Hippolytus, writing in the
third century c.e.
Anaximenes continued the same line of inquiry as Thales, wish-
ing to discover the primary element. However, he differed from the
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earlier Milesian natural philosopher by believing that the source of
all material objects was air. Like the other two Milesians, he devel-
oped astronomical theories, inspired by his belief in his particular
element. He argued that the Sun, Moon, and stars originally
evolved from the Earth. His theory of the solar system continued
by arguing that moisture rose from the Earth and, when rareﬁed,
produced ﬁre. The stars and the other heavenly bodies were all
made of ﬁre and rested on air, on account of their breadth and ﬂat-
ness, he suggested. He further believed that the stars were fastened
to a crystal sphere, like nails or studs, whereas the planets rode on
the air independently. (The notion of “crystal spheres” would sur-
vive until the Renaissance!)
Anaximenes also seems to have believed that in the region of the
heavens occupied by the stars there were separate bodies like the
Earth, which the stars carried round with them. It has been sug-
gested that Anaximenes invented these bodies to explain solar and
lunar eclipses—although an “alternative worlds” interpretation is
also possible. Thus Anaximenes continued the noble tradition
of Thales in seeking to explain celestial phenomena, rather than
simply being content with the ability to predict their behavior. A
fragment recorded by Aetius sums up Anaximenes’ ethereal world-
view: “Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath
and air encompass the whole world.”
Anaximenes is the last of the line of the great Milesian natural
philosophers, who were so signiﬁcant in the beginning of the his-
tory of cosmology and natural science. Unlike his predecessors,
Anaximenes would have spent his mature years under the Persian
Empire. Herodotus records how Croesus, king of the Lydians, was
encouraged by the Delphic oracle’s prediction to attack the Per-
sians in 546 b.c.e.The oracle had said that if he attacked the Per-
sians, he would destroy a mighty empire. He happily went on the
offensive, only to ﬁnd in defeat that the mighty empire destroyed
was his own! Miletus thus passed from one foreign ruler to another,
and it continued to ﬂourish for another ﬁfty years before becom-
ing the center of an Ionian revolt against the Persian satraps. The
revolt failed, as the Persians brought in reinforcements from their
huge empire. In 494 b.c.e.Miletus was sacked by the Persians and
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lost its leading role as the major Greek scientiﬁc center. That dis-
tinction was to pass to the city of Athens, which inﬂicted two ma-
jor defeats on the Persians, at Marathon in 490 b.c.e.and at Salamis
in 480 b.c.e.But as the baton of enlightenment was passed on, the
role of the Milesians should not be forgotten in shaping all that
followed.
We will examine the great thinkers of classical Athens later in
the chapter. Now we move from the western shores of Asia Minor
to the southern shores of Italy. Greek colonists built cities all over
the Mediterranean coastline, and few of these colonists are more
renowned than Pythagoras. However, it is more accurate to talk
about the school of Pythagoras, since many of the discoveries and
theories that carry his name are more likely to have been developed
by his followers. Pythagorean philosophy ranged from the sublime
(for example a veneration for the study of numbers) to the ridicu-
lous (an abhorrence to eating beans). But the Pythagoreans cer-
tainly represent the next stage in the history of Greek speculation
on the cosmos.
Pythagoras and his early followers left no written works that sur-
vived. Their ideas endured through the traditions of their oral
teaching, which were later recorded by other philosophers. Plato
and Aristotle refer to Pythagorean teaching, and Plato was clearly
highly inﬂuenced by Pythagorean arguments for the immortality of
the soul. It is very difﬁcult to date these arguments, however, and
especially difﬁcult to know which arguments and ideas actually
date back to Pythagoras himself. In the fourth century b.c.e.and
afterward, the histories of Pythagoreanism and Platonism became
interlinked, and thus any interpretation of their respective contri-
butions is bound to be somewhat confused.
Despite the obscurity of his personal ideas, there is a rich source
of anecdotes about Pythagoras, and later historians recorded a
number of details of his eventful and turbulent life. He was born
around 570 b.c.e.on the island of Samos, not far from Miletus, and
thus it is plausible to believe that he was aware of the ideas of the
Milesian natural philosophers. Around 540 b.c.e.he emigrated
from Samos to the distant Greek colony of Croton in southern
Italy. He founded his ﬁrst school in Croton, teaching both men and
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women, and he became very prominent in the city. Later, however,
he was exiled from Croton, probably because of political or reli-
gious controversy, and he settled in the nearby southern Italian
town of Metapontum, which was also a Greek colony. Here he
continued to lead his school, and it is likely that many of his stu-
dents shared in his exile, during which he continued to teach large
numbers of inﬂuential people.
The doctrine that seems most closely associated with Pythago-
ras is his belief in the immortality of the soul and its repeated
incarnation. His astronomical opinions are harder to deﬁne. The
ideas attributed to him by the most optimistic historians may in-
stead belong to his school. Diogenes Laertius states that Pythago-
ras was the ﬁrst to argue that the Earth was round, although Laer-
tius was aware that some ancient authorities held different opinions
(Theophrastus gave the credit to Parmenides, while Zeno attrib-
uted this belief to Hesiod). Laertius also believed that Pythagoras
was the ﬁrst of the Greeks to discover that the “morning” and the
“evening” star are the same (the planet Venus). Like so much else
in astronomy, most historians believe that the Babylonians in fact
made this discovery.
The most signiﬁcant astronomical theories seem to belong to
Pythagoras’s followers rather than to the man himself. Aristotle, in
his work On the Heavens, discusses the astronomical views of the
Pythagorean school. The Pythagoreans had a distinct view of the
universe as spherical and ﬁnite in size. They believed that the plan-
ets, the Sun, and the Moon were ﬁxed to spheres rotating around
a central ﬁre, with the stars forming an outermost sphere. In keep-
ing with this system, they also asserted that the Earth, Sun, and
Moon were spherical in structure.
Aristotle again discusses Pythagorean astronomy in his work
Metaphysics. He states that the Pythagoreans believed that the
heavens were governed by harmony and number, arising from their
studies of musical harmony. They believed that the number ten was
the perfect number, and thus they believed that there were ten
heavenly bodies, orbiting around the central ﬁre. Since they could
observe only nine (the ﬁrst six planets, the Moon, the Sun, and the
stars), they claimed that there was an undiscovered “counter-Earth”
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to make up this number and also to help explain the mystery of
eclipses. The universe was seen to be “in complete harmony,” with
each of the celestial bodies being associated with its own musical
note (leading to the concept of “the music of the spheres” to ex-
plain the behavior of the heavens). Because of their veneration of
mathematics, the Pythagoreans believed that the distances of the
planets from the central ﬁre could be calculated through a logical
arithmetical series. Thus they play an important role in our story
as the ﬁrst thinkers to try to use mathematical concepts to estimate
the size of the universe, even though their estimates were primar-
ily based on simplistic arguments.
The Pythagorean concept of the universe being based on spheres
does seem to have been derived from detailed observations. Greek
astronomers observed that in Athens the constellation Ursa Major
(Great Bear) always remains above the horizon, whereas in Egypt
it appears to move below the horizon. To explain these observa-
tions, they inferred that the Earth must be a spherical body ﬂoat-
ing in the sky. From this belief they drew the further inference that
the fundamental shape of the celestial bodies and the heavens
themselves must be spherical.
The most famous theory associated with Pythagoras is, of course,
his explanation of the relationship between the hypotenuse and the
other two sides of a right-angled triangle: “the square of the hy-
potenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”
Sadly this theory seems more likely to have been discovered by
Pythagoras’s followers than by the great man himself. However, it
is typical of the many discoveries and theories that the school pro-
duced in the ﬁeld of mathematics, especially in the analysis of tri-
angles and polygons.
Pythagoras certainly resembles a cult leader more than a modern
scientist. The mathematical discoveries achieved by his school
were, however, of lasting signiﬁcance. Pythagoras deserves his rep-
utation as the ﬁrst Greek to study mathematics enthusiastically for
its own sake, even if his motivation appears to have been grounded
partly in religious mysticism. Pythagoras and his followers have cer-
tainly been proved right in their belief that mathematics is the es-
sential tool to understanding the universe. For this insight alone,
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they do mark a signiﬁcant step in the history of the understanding
of the size and nature of the universe.
Anaxagoras provides the link between the cosmology of the
Milesians and the philosophical schools of Athens. He was born in
Clazomenae around 500 b.c.e., shortly before the Ionian revolt
against the Persians. In his early twenties (according to Diogenes
Laertius), he migrated to Athens, with its new democratic consti-
tution; Athens was the largest and richest city in the Greek world
at the time, after its victories against Persia. Anaxagoras was said to
have written only one book, which, following the example of An-
aximander, boldly attempted to give a complete account of the ori-
gin and structure of the cosmos, including some inquiry into its
size. (Diogenes Laertius says that Anaxagoras was the ﬁrst natural
philosopher to publish a book with diagrams.)
Anaxagoras was the ﬁrst philosopher to live and work in
Athens—but he was the ﬁrst of many. He became a close friend of
Pericles, the greatest statesman of democratic Athens, and also of
the radical Athenian playwright Euripides. He taught the famous
moral philosopher Socrates, who eventually chose to explore very
different philosophical questions. The comic poet Aristophanes
parodies Socrates as an impious stargazer in his famous surviving
comedy The Clouds. This picture seems very remote from the Soc-
rates recorded in detail by such writers as Plato and Xenophon, and
may in fact be a parody of Anaxagoras and his followers. Of all the
philosophers we have so far discussed, Anaxagoras was the one
most committed to cosmology. When someone asked him what
was the object of being born, he replied: “to investigate the Sun,
Moon, and heavens.” According to Diogenes Laertius, when some-
one asked him why he was unconcerned with politics and the wel-
fare of his country, he replied: “be quiet—I have the greatest care
for my country”—pointing to the heavens.
Anaxagoras’s greatest claim to fame rests on his solution of one
of the great questions of ancient Greek astronomy, which dated
back to Thales of Miletus, namely a persuasive explanation of solar
and lunar eclipses. He discovered that the Moon does not shine by
its own light but receives its light from the Sun. From this prem-
ise, he correctly deduced that eclipses of the Sun were caused by
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the interposition of the Moon, and that eclipses of the Moon were
caused by the interposition of the Earth. This quality of reasoning
shows the progress that had been made over the ﬁrst hundred years
of Greek cosmology and marks Anaxagoras as a rational scientist.
However, Anaxagoras also agreed with Anaximenes that it was rea-
sonable to assume that other dark heavenly bodies existed which,
although invisible to us, sometimes obscured the Moon to cause
eclipses.
Anaxagoras clearly also developed detailed theories to explain
the origin of the universe. He believed in a “motive principle,”
which may be loosely interpreted as “mind.” This motive principle
disturbed a vortex of collected matter, where “all things were to-
gether.” The rotary movement of this vortex began at a single point
and progressively spread through wider and wider circles. This ac-
celerating movement was supposed to have caused two distinct
masses to separate off. The ﬁrst, which Anaxagoras called “aether”
or “ﬁre,” consisted of the hot, the light, and the dry, while the
second, which he called air, consisted of the cool, the heavy, and
the wet.
Anaxagoras assigned aether/ﬁre to an outer circle of the uni-
verse, while air made up the inner area. The next phase of his hy-
pothesis was the separation of the inner air into clouds, water,
Earth, and other solid and liquid objects, as opposed to the gaseous
substances of aether/ﬁre. Thus Anaxagoras theorized that the heav-
iest mass had collected in the center, and from this mass Earth was
formed. In order to explain the stars, Anaxagoras assumed that be-
cause of the violent whirling motion of the inner and outer circles,
the surrounding ﬁery aether had torn stones from the Earth and
created the stars. As ridiculous as these notions appear today, they
were imaginative hypotheses to explain the observed natural world.
Anaxagoras also had detailed theories about the observable
heavenly bodies. Following Anaximenes, but disagreeing with the
Pythagoreans, he believed that the world was ﬂat and was sup-
ported by air. Anaxagoras claimed that the Sun and stars were all
stones on ﬁre, carried round by the revolution of the aether. He
did attempt to estimate the size of some of the heavenly bodies, ar-
guing that “the Sun is larger than the Peloponnese” (the peninsula
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of southern Greece). This does seem to imply that he did not think
it was much bigger than the Peloponnese, and particularly that he
thought that the Sun was smaller than the Earth. However, we do
not know Anaxagoras’s reasoning to produce this belief. He is also
quoted as believing that the Moon was of a substance similar to the
Earth, and that it had plains and mountains (a fact that Galileo
would verify when he ﬁrst turned a telescope to the heavens in
1609 c.e.).
For the quality of his reasoning, the depth of his imagination,
and above all for his absolute commitment to scientiﬁc reasoning
against the opposition of powerful political persecutors, Anaxago-
ras undoubtedly deserves a place among the most signiﬁcant of the
Greek thinkers. There is good evidence that Anaxagoras suffered
persecution from the institutions of democratic Athens for his sci-
entiﬁc beliefs. Plutarch, writing under the Roman Empire, records
that the “decree of Diopethes,” the diviner, was directed against
Anaxagoras. This decree, presumably passed by the assembly of
Athenian citizens, ordered that “anyone who did not believe in the
gods or who taught theories about celestial phenomena” should be
liable to prosecution—presaging a form of intolerance to intellec-
tual advancement witnessed again when Copernicus and Galileo
sparked their own revolution in cosmology. Anaxagoras was ac-
cused of impiety, allegedly for saying that the Sun was a red-hot
stone and the Moon made from Earth. This sad affair shows that
even in the ﬁfth century b.c.e., at the height of its prosperity, the
Athenian democracy was capable of the kind of witch hunt prac-
ticed again in 399 b.c.e.with the trial and execution of Socrates,
ﬁve years after the demoralizing defeat in the Peloponnesian War
against Sparta.
After Anaxagoras, the quantity of information on the ancients
increases dramatically. For all the previous philosophers, we have
had to rely on fragments or short accounts of their work. By con-
trast the surviving works of the great classical philosophers Plato
and Aristotle run into several volumes.
We will next move on to consider the view of the cosmos pro-
duced by the scholars of Plato’s Academy, an institution where ed-
ucated scholars and mature students researched the deepest ques-
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tions of classical Athens. Plato’s own philosophical interests devel-
oped from the questions examined by his great teacher Socrates.
Thus Plato’s great works are mainly concerned with ethics, politics,
epistemology (the study of what we can know), and the immortal-
ity of the soul. He believed that reality could be understood only
through gaining knowledge of ideas or forms, such as the form of
the good, and that the objects of the visible world were at best in-
adequate copies of the real forms, which had existed since the be-
ginning of time. Thus Plato and his subsequent followers tended to
reject an observational and experimental approach to astronomy,
because of distrust of the senses and because of their belief in ra-
tional arguments from ﬁrst principles.
Despite this idealistic epistemology, Plato did write one major
dialogue, the Timaeus, where he outlines a series of cosmological
beliefs. Plato’s own position on the explanation for the creation of
the universe comes down clearly on the side of the argument from
design. The most powerful narrative within the Timaeusis that of
the great designer, the demiurge, creating the cosmos as a living
being according to a perfect model. A deity imposes reason on ne-
cessity to bring order from the receptacle of disordered matter,
creating a “child,” the cosmos, which is the copy of a perfect idea,
which has existed eternally. Plato adapted Anaxagoras’s belief in
“mind” controlling the universe and supposed that a speciﬁc intel-
ligence had organized the creation of the universe and governed
the laws of nature. Here we have a total commitment to an ordered
and hierarchical cosmos—with no hint of its opposite, chaos.
In his classic work the RepublicPlato seems to assume an early
Pythagorean theory of the solar system, with the heavenly bodies
rotating round the Earth. Plutarch and other writers refer to a later
Platonic view, that the Earth was not worthy of the central place
in the universe, and these writers say that he adopted the later Py-
thagorean theory of the central ﬁre around which the planets ro-
tated. This view gains some support from a passage from the Laws,
Plato’s ﬁnal work, written in his extreme old age. The Athenian
stranger, who most commentators think represents Plato himself,
says that the Sun, Moon, and planets “always follow the same path
in a circle.”
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Despite this wealth of material, Plato seems to have popularized
Pythagorean views of astronomy rather than to have developed
original ideas (in sharp contrast to his contribution to epistemol-
ogy and political thought). His main contributions were to follow
Pythagoras in stressing the value of mathematics and to create a
school where scholars could think and study. It was later members
of the Academy who would make the school’s most signiﬁcant
contribution to astronomy.
As well as being a great philosopher, Plato was undoubtedly a
great educator, who particularly believed in the educational value
of astronomy. He is said to have set as a problem for his successors
at the Academy the challenge to ﬁnd “what are the uniform and
ordered movements by the assumption of which the motion of the
planets can be accounted for?” Plato was certain that circular mo-
tion was the key, since this was the simplest uniform motion that
repeated itself endlessly as the annual cycle of the heavens appeared
to do.
Eudoxus of Cnidos produced the ﬁrst development in astro-
nomical theory in response to this challenge. Eudoxus had attended
some of Plato’s lectures at the Academy and was a talented mathe-
matician. Eudoxus’s approach to explaining the motion of the heav-
ens was the hypothesis of concentric spheres. Eudoxus assigned the
ﬁxed stars to a huge outer sphere and the Earth to a much smaller
sphere ﬁxed at the center. The huge star sphere then rotated
around the Earth every twenty-four hours. The Sun was attached
to a concentric sphere within the star sphere, and clearly its sphere
had to be transparent since the stars could be seen through it at
night. Then more concentric spheres were assigned to the planets.
However, this “simple” arrangement could not describe the per-
ceived motions. A particular issue was the behavior of some of the
planets. What made them pause their easterly motion night on
night and, for a short period, appear to trace a westerly loop before
resuming their eastward path—a so-called retrograde motion? Eu-
doxus reproduced the irregular planetary motions through adding
further concentric spheres to the planetary concentric spheres, each
revolving at a uniform rate but about different axes. He needed
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four extra concentric spheres for each of the planets. And he needed
to allocate three extra spheres to the Sun and the Moon to describe
their motions. By adjusting the orientation of each axis, and the
rotational velocity of each and every sphere, Eudoxus was able to
reproduce, with a reasonable approximation, the motions of the
celestial bodies as they had been observed. Eudoxus’s spheres were
subsequently modiﬁed by a later astronomer, Callipus, and then
adopted and modiﬁed by Aristotle, who added more spheres to the
celestial bodies. Aristotle’s synthesis of “prior art” in fact contained
ﬁfty-ﬁve transparent spheres! Aristotle clearly believed in the real-
ity of these transparent spheres, although it is likely that Eudoxus
saw them merely as a clever geometrical trick to predict the be-
havior of the planetary bodies. Eudoxus’s hypothesis was the ﬁrst
detailed attempt to provide a mathematical basis to explain the ob-
servations of the solar system. It was an elegant (albeit incorrect)
use of geometry applied to an astronomical problem, based on the
established Pythagorean tradition of the perfection of the sphere.
Before Eudoxus, Greek astronomers were vague about the num-
ber and names of the planets. Eudoxus’s hypothesis and calculations
ended this ambiguity and imposed greater discipline and accuracy
on astronomical studies. Eudoxus seems to have been well aware of
Babylonian discoveries. In his work he does make use of Babylon-
ian observations, which can be seen in his descriptions of different
constellations. Much of what followed owed immeasurably to the
foundations laid by Eudoxus.
Heraclides of Pontus (388–315 b.c.e.), who was a pupil of Plato
and a contemporary of Aristotle, made further important contri-
butions to astronomy. Heraclides was the ﬁrst Greek astronomer to
argue that the apparent daily rotation of the heavenly bodies is
caused not by a rotation of a heavenly sphere about an axis through
the center of the Earth but by the Earth itself rotating about its own
axis. Heraclides’ second argument was that Mercury and Venus or-
bit around the Sun. These two theories anticipate the Copernican
revolution, and another Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos
(310 –230 b.c.e.), as we shall see, further anticipated Copernicus’s
theories by arguing that all the planets (including the Earth) rotate
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around the Sun. Sadly these major advances in understanding were
not consolidated into later developments, and the logic of the plan-
ets orbiting the Sun was lost.
Alongside Plato, Aristotle is the other genius of Greek philoso-
phy whose work survives in extensive detail. Although Aristotle’s
work does not have the outstanding literary merit of Plato’s dia-
logues, his arguments in ﬁelds such as ethics, logic, politics, and
natural science have probably made an even greater contribution
to our civilization.
Aristotle (384 –322b.c.e.) was born in the northern Greek king-
dom of Macedonia, in the town of Stageira. In his younger days he
became one of the most famous students and scholars of Plato’s
Academy, but around 344 b.c.e.he founded the Lyceum, which
became the second of the great philosophical schools in Athens.
His followers were called Peripatetics, after the gathering place
called Peripatos (the Walk), which was in the same area of Athens.
An important motivation for Aristotle to set up the Lyceum was
the fact that he had been overlooked for the post of head of Acad-
emy on Plato’s death, which went instead to Plato’s cousin, Speu-
sippos (who in fairness was also an important thinker).
Like Plato, Aristotle believed that astronomy was a vital part of
science and that its study was of great educational value. Also like
Plato, however, he did not produce much original work on astron-
omy. Aristotle’s major contribution to the history of cosmology
was to provide testing criticism of the work of earlier natural phi-
losophers, and it is through such criticism, and from that of later
commentators on his work, principally Simplicius in the sixth cen-
tury c.e., that we get much of our knowledge and understanding
of earlier cosmological writers.
Aristotle’s analysis of the different cosmological theories was
governed by his differences from Plato in his views on the acquisi-
tion of knowledge. Aristotle was skeptical of Plato’s theory of per-
fect and eternal forms, which might potentially be understood by
the use of reason alone. Instead he believed that observable phe-
nomena made up the real world, whereas ideas and concepts ex-
plained the essence of these observable phenomena.
Aristotle followed Empedocles, the Greek philosopher from
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Sicily, in believing in four basic elements: earth, air, ﬁre, and wa-
ter. However, Aristotle also believed in a ﬁfth element (the “quin-
tessence”), which he called “aether.” All the heavenly bodies, he
surmised, were made from this ﬁfth element. While the four ter-
restrial elements continued to change from one to another, the el-
ement belonging to the heavens remained unchanged and perfect.
Thus was born the philosophy of the perfect immutable universe—
and this Aristotelian view of the cosmos would remain largely in-
tact in Europe until the Renaissance.
Aristotle accepted the vision of the cosmos developed in the
model of the spheres of Eudoxus. Indeed it is thanks to Aristotle’s
work that we have detailed records of Eudoxus’s hypotheses. Aris-
totle also presented a number of important astronomical arguments
in his own right. Firstly he presented some logical inferences from
observation to prove that the Earth must be spherical. He noticed
that the shadow of the Earth always appears as an arc on the Moon
during a lunar eclipse. He also conﬁrmed that the star sphere ap-
peared displaced as an observer moved north or south on Earth’s
surface, that eclipses occurred at different times at different lo-
cations, and that in sailing toward a distant island it appeared to
emerge up out of the sea. All these observations, he argued, indi-
cated that the Earth had to be spherical.
Aristotle believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe
and was farther from the Sun than from the Moon. His reason for
this second belief was that during a total solar eclipse the Moon
completely covered the Sun. Of course this deduction is cor-
rect, and is in keeping with the quality of Aristotle’s best logical
deductions.
Aristotle believed that the universe was spherical in structure
and had a constant circular motion. Thus he deduced that it must
be ﬁnite, since an inﬁnite body has no center around which it may
rotate. He believed there could be no space outside the universe,
since space is only that in which a physical body can exist.
As we have already discussed, Aristotle was inﬂuenced by Eu-
doxus’s hypothesis of concentric spheres. The fact that Aristotle
added further “reacting spheres” to try to produce a coherent sys-
tem to govern the movement of all the heavenly bodies made the
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hypothesis more complicated and represented no signiﬁcant im-
provement in the ability to track the paths of the Sun, Moon, and
planets.
After the conquests and death of Alexander in 323 b.c.e., the
center of Greek astronomical research gradually moved from
Athens to Alexandria in Egypt. As Alexander’s empire was break-
ing up, Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s friends and marshals, seized
control of Egypt and set up a Greek kingdom there. Ptolemy’s
Egypt turned out to be the longest lasting of the Greek monarchies
founded by Alexander’s successors, and the famous Cleopatra was
the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty, losing her kingdom to the Roman
leader Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 b.c.e.
The Ptolemaic dynasty enters our story because they were the
greatest patrons of science in the Greek world. Ptolemy had plenty
of money from his rich revenues and his wealthy capital, Alexan-
dria. However, he wanted legitimacy and social standing for his
new kingdom without provoking stronger military powers such as
the Seleucids. What better way to achieve this than to sponsor the
Greek world’s leading scientists? As in the modern world, the aca-
demics quickly followed the money, resulting in an ancient brain
drain. Ptolemy’s successors continued his enlightened policy, re-
sulting in a golden age of patronage. Thus they set up the ﬁnal great
Greek astronomical school, called the Alexandrian Museum, which
sponsored great scholars, such as Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, and
Hipparchus. In fact the most signiﬁcant developments in Greek as-
tronomy were made at Alexandria in the second century b.c.e.
Alexandrian astronomers were also helped by easier access to the
Babylonian data and by greater exchange of information all around
the Mediterranean and the Near East, which was under control of
Greek kingdoms. The library of Alexandria became the greatest ar-
chive of classical learning until its tragic destruction in the seventh
century c.e.
The ﬁrst great astronomer of the Alexandrian Museum was
Aristarchus (about 300 –230 b.c.e.). Aristarchus was born on the
Greek island of Samos, the birthplace of Pythagoras, but migrated
to Alexandria—presumably to beneﬁt from the patronage of the
Ptolemys. Aristarchus’s great claim to fame was that he was the ﬁrst
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Greek astronomer to argue on the basis of logic that the Earth or-
bits the Sun. Aristarchus’s theory was that the Sun and the stars are
ﬁxed bodies. He placed the Sun at the center of the universe, while
the stars were located on a distant outer sphere. Earth and the other
planets revolved around the Sun in circular orbits. Aristarchus’s
contemporaries and successors, such as Hipparchus, the greatest of
all the Alexandrian astronomers, nearly all rejected his theory. His
only supporter, says Plutarch, was Seleucus of Seleucia on the Tig-
ris. Archimedes describes the Greek scholars’ objection as being
that there was no observable change in the apparent position of the
stars, such as one would expect if the Earth moved around the Sun.
(This is the parallax issue, which we will explore in some detail in
the next chapter.) Since their current theories appeared to explain
the observable phenomena, these astronomers, who founded their
views on Aristotle’s epistemology, had no incentive to change these
theories.
Aristarchus did produce the correct riposte to this objection,
namely that the stars were at such a distance from Earth that it was
impossible to observe any apparent motion in the stars. Thus, for
our story of the different theories on the size of the universe, it is
interesting to note that of all the ancient astronomers, Aristarchus
is the one who conceived of the vast distances from Earth to the
stars. However, he could produce no evidence to prove this as-
sumption, and the consensus of opinion swung away from a helio-
centric theory. Aristarchus produced an improved estimate of the
distance from the Earth to the Moon from simple geometrical ar-
guments, deriving a pretty fair estimate of thirty Earth diameters.
This Earth-Moon distance would provide a reasonably secure ﬁrst
rung on the cosmic distance ladder for almost two thousand years.
Aristarchus’s theory of a heliocentric solar system with the stars
a vast distance away, which he proposed in the third century b.c.e.,
was remarkably accurate, but it was sadly ignored by scholars until
the theories of Copernicus in the ﬁfteenth century c.e.In fact, like
Anaxagoras, Aristarchus attracted religious criticism. Plutarch re-
cords that Cleanthes the Stoic thought that Aristarchus ought to
be indicted for impiety “for putting in motion the Hearth of the
Universe.” Happily Ptolemy’s kingdom of Alexandria was more
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tolerant of the conclusions of astronomers than democratic Athens
had been—or the medieval Inquisition would prove to be.
Eratosthenes, the third head of the Alexandrian Museum, was
the ﬁrst man to be able to accurately estimate the size of the Earth,
and he achieved this by astronomical means. By estimating the size
of the Earth, Eratosthenes also achieved an important step in esti-
mating the size of the cosmos.
Eratosthenes’ method for measuring Earth’s size was a brilliant
combination of logic and geometry, as recorded by the writer
Cleomedes. On June 21 (the ﬁrst day of the summer solstice) he
observed in the town of Syene (modern Aswan) in the south of
Ptolemy’s kingdom that the noon Sun was directly overhead, be-
cause its rays completely covered the ﬂoor of a deep well. How-
ever, on the same day in Alexandria, a distance 5,000 stadia north,
the Sun was not directly overhead, because objects there were cast-
ing shadows. He assumed that the Sun’s rays reach Earth along par-
allel lines. He then measured the angle between the Sun’s rays and
an obelisk in Alexandria, which he estimated at 7
1
⁄2degrees. He
then deduced that this angle was equal to the angle at Earth’s cen-
ter that separates the diameter to Alexandria and the diameter to
Syene. Since 7
1
⁄2degrees is
1
⁄48th of the 360 degrees making up a
complete circle, he deduced that the distance between Syene and
Alexandria must be
1
⁄48th of Earth’s circumference. Thus he multi-
plied the distance between the cities by 48 and produced a value
for Earth’s circumference (within an admirable precision). The
quality of this deduction, the use of observation, and the applica-
tion of geometry make it one of the most striking achievements of
the school of the Alexandrian Museum in its long and illustrious
history.
Most scholars consider Hipparchus to be the greatest obser-
vational astronomer of the ancient Greek world. He was born in
Nicaea, in Bithynia (modern northwestern Turkey), but, like so
many other Greek scientists, migrated to Alexandria. Claudius
Ptolemy records his observations between 161 and 126 b.c.e.,
so we can deduce that he was born around 185 b.c.e.Hipparchus’s
unique achievement was the creation of a catalogue of nearly one
thousand stars. He created this catalogue with his own detailed ob-
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servations and by carefully examining the observations of his pre-
decessors. He had the advantage by the latter part of his career of
150 years of records built up by the Alexandrian Museum, and he
also used data of Babylonian origin. Hipparchus’s catalogue was
so accurate that it enabled later astronomers to make important
discoveries.
Hipparchus was also interested in calculating the movements of
the Sun, Moon, and planets. From detailed observation of the po-
sition of the stars he was able to demonstrate that Earth’s axis of ro-
tation is not ﬁxed in space but precesses gradually. He calculated
the length of seasons and developed a chart that gave the position
of the Sun on the ecliptic for each day of the year. He made an
excellent estimate of the tropic year as 365 days, 5 hours, 55 min-
utes, and 12 seconds. (This exceeds the modern calculation by a
mere 6 minutes and 30 seconds.) Certainly Babylonian calculations
by astronomers such as Naburiannu (ﬂ. 500 b.c.e.) and Kidinnu
(ﬂ. 383 b.c.e.) would have helped Hipparchus signiﬁcantly. Under
Hipparchus precision observational astronomy was coming of age.
In order to produce his observations, Hipparchus is credited
with developing a number of measuring devices. He is believed to
have used the armillary astrolabe, a set of concentric rings rotating
round one another to simulate the relative movements of the heav-
enly bodies. He also used an improved dioptra (a primitive survey-
ing instrument for measuring angles), which could be adjusted for
the inclination of the North Pole.
Signiﬁcantly Hipparchus introduced the idea of an “epicycle,” a
small circular orbit rotating around a big circular motion, as a math-
ematical alternative to concentric spheres in an Earth-centered
cosmos, a concept extended later by Claudius Ptolemy. But to
make use of the concept a form of trigonometry was needed,
which Hipparchus developed. Thus Hipparchus can be credited
with the invention of trigonometry. He compiled a table of chords
in a circle, an early version of modern trigonometric tables. To-
gether with the work of his catalogue of the stars, Hipparchus also
devised a magnitude scale for measuring the brightness of stars, a
derivative of which is still used today.
Importantly for our story, Hipparchus improved on Aristarchus’s
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estimates for the distances of the Sun and Moon. He calculated the
mean distance of the Moon to be about 34 times the diameter of
the Earth and the distance of the Sun to be 1,245 times the diam-
eter of the Earth. This estimate for the Moon is remarkably accu-
rate, but he underestimated the distance to the Sun by a signiﬁcant
margin. These calculations show that Hipparchus had gained some
understanding of the vast size of the solar system. However, it
would take more modern techniques to understand the vast dis-
tances to the stars.
Hipparchus’s career is a clear contradiction of the generalization
that Greek thinkers were concerned mainly with theory to the ex-
clusion of experiment and measurement. This misunderstanding
has developed from an analysis that has placed too much weight on
Plato’s epistemology and not enough on the works of Aristotle and
his successors. Hipparchus’s work is so remarkable precisely because
it is based on detailed observation, accurate measurement, and
sound logical reasoning.
The Alexandrian Museum and library continued to be proud
beacons of Hellenistic culture, but power and wealth were moving
west. The developing power of Rome threatened the stability of the
empire, and while Alexandria continued to be a populous and
wealthy city, less original research was produced after the death of
Hipparchus. Rome’s culture was more militaristic, and the golden
age of patronage was over.
After 30 b.c.e.Egypt and Alexandria were integrated within the
Roman Empire, as a special ﬁefdom of the emperor. Its strategic
importance became vital as Rome’s major source of grain. No Ro-
man senator was allowed to enter Egypt without the emperor’s per-
mission. Alexandria became the empire’s second city and had the
most turbulent civil life, with regular riots between the different
ethnic populations, such as Greeks, native Egyptians, and Jews, all
carefully monitored by the governor of Egypt, one of the most sen-
sitive posts in the whole empire, who reported directly to the Ro-
man emperor. The proud traditions of the Alexandrian Museum
and the library continued, respected and honored by the Roman
conquerors, but fewer great names emerge from our sources to
match the eminence of Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus.
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The one great astronomer of Roman Alexandria was Claudius
Ptolemy. He ﬂourished in Alexandria around 150c.e., at the height
of the Roman Empire. His very name was a sign of the times, with
his second name recording the Hellenistic rulers but his ﬁrst name
recalling an emperor of Rome.
Claudius Ptolemy’s great contribution to astronomy was his
famous work the Almagest, which presented formally the astro-
nomical theories of the day that had evolved from the great debates
within the different Greek philosophical schools. Claudius Ptol-
emy freely admitted that he had contributed little original research
to the treatise but rather had based his conclusions principally on
the work of Hipparchus, nearly three hundred years earlier. The
Almagest, which survives in detail, is by far our most important
source for the work of Hipparchus. Ptolemy, like most scholars,
preferred Hipparchus’s Earth-centered universe to Aristarchus’s
heliocentric system. And he built up the use of circular orbits with
epicycles in an Earth-centered universe as the way to describe the
complex motions of the heavenly bodies—including the retro-
grade motion of the planets. Each planet moved in a small circle,
called the “epicycle,” the center of which moved around a larger
circle, called the “deferent.” The retrograde motion of the planet
coincided with the planet passing inside the deferent.
Importantly, Ptolemy did not claim that his cosmological model
described the actual conditions. It simply reproduced geometri-
cally the observed motions of the known heavenly bodies and en-
abled their positions to be easily predicted for any particular time.
For over fourteen centuries, the Almagestwas accepted as the prime
source of knowledge on the theories of Greek astronomy and
was used as the basis for astronomical work. As the religious be-
liefs of Europe changed, Ptolemy’s work was accepted by the Cath-
olic Church and was assumed into the canon of orthodoxy. The
mind of humanity was ﬁxed for almost ﬁfteen hundred years. Only
the work of the great ﬁgures of the scientiﬁc Renaissance would
shift it. The Renaissance thinkers are of course vital in our quest,
and they made a huge contribution to how educated people view
the universe. Ironically, even when Copernicus’s heliocentric the-
ory had replaced the Ptolemaic system, many astronomers used
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Ptolemy’s model to predict the motion of the planets, since its in-
tricate calculations produced more accurate values.
In fact modern astronomical detective work suggests that Ptol-
emy may have falsiﬁed certain observations to demonstrate the va-
lidity of some of his ideas. Of course he could never have antici-
pated that the power of modern astronomy would catch up with
his sleight of hand. However, this should in no way detract from
his monumental works.
From Thales to Hipparchus, the great age of innovation in Greek
astronomy covers over four hundred years. The Almagestof Ptol-
emy represents the climax of their debates, and the strictures of
authority restricted research in Europe beyond the conclusions
of the Greeks until the heroic discoveries of Copernicus, Tycho,
Kepler, Galileo, and Newton a millennium and a half later. We may
ask, What distinguishes the Greeks’ astronomy from that of their
main competitors from the ancient world, the Babylonians? The
answer is the genius of the Greek philosophers for speculation. The
Greeks owed a great debt to the Babylonians in terms of the details
of their astronomy, and before Hipparchus they were inferior to
the Babylonians in the quality of their observations. However, the
variety of speculative visions from the Greeks was unique before
the Renaissance. We know that the Babylonians produced detailed
cycles for the prediction of eclipses and that they observed and re-
corded the apparent motions of the planets; however, we have no
evidence of the Babylonians formulating any theories to account
for the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets.
Over successive generations, Greek natural philosophers such as
Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Aristarchus, and Hipparchus developed
bold theories, containing elements that have provoked interest
among all subsequent generations of cosmologists. The ingenious
visions of the Greeks and their speculative genius provided inspira-
tion for the great thinkers of the scientiﬁc renaissance, who redis-
covered the Greek joy of original thinking. The four hundred years
we have concentrated on, from Thales to Hipparchus, were an era
of progressive development and continuous debate. The debates
between the followers of Plato and Aristotle, and especially be-
tween the adherents of Hipparchus and Aristarchus, would estab-
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lish a tradition of confrontational dialogue between different phil-
osophies that has characterized scientiﬁc advancement up to the
present day.
The Greek passion for knowledge and discovery should certainly
be a challenge to our own era, in which the idea of astronomical
research, and indeed academic study for its own sake, is under con-
stant attack. A ﬁtting epigram to summarize the spirit of the Greek
natural philosophers was written by the last of the great line, Clau-
dius Ptolemy.
I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when
I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet
no longer touch the Earth, but side by side with Zeus him-
self, I take my ﬁll of ambrosia, the food of the gods.
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The teachings of the ancient
Greeks dominated intellectual development within Europe from
Claudius Ptolemy all the way through to the sixteenth century.
But for a long while there was little further development. With
the Mongols and the Chinese pressing them from the east, the
Huns started a westward path of conquest in the third century c.e.
They destroyed much of what they encountered. The collapse of
the great Roman Empire was ﬁnally signiﬁed with the deposing in
476 c.e.of the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, by
Odoacer. The successor Byzantine Empire followed suit when the
Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 c.e.From 400 c.e.scholar-
ship, so cherished by the Greeks, declined in Europe because of the
hostility between the Christian church and paganism. The great
schools of Greece, and the Alexandrian Museum, had been pagan.
The Christians destroyed many of the institutions that were per-
ceived as being pagan and burned many of the great classical librar-
ies such as that at Serapis. Much of the precious cultural heritage
of the ancient Greeks was destroyed in burnings of the books in the
name of Christian orthodoxy. This destruction of ancient writings
was a crime of immense proportions. The Western world entered
an intellectual dark age. During this period it was the Arabs who
assumed custody of the proud Greek heritage of scholarship.
The Almagestwas translated into Arabic and formed the basis
for a new golden era of Arabic astronomy. The Arabs proved to be
skilled observers, and they established centers in Baghdad and Da-
mascus to advance astronomy. Novel equipment was built for ob-
serving the stars. Al Mamon, one of the ﬁnest scholars of the ninth
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century, built an observatory and astronomical library in Baghdad
that was the ﬁnest of the era. The best-known Arabian astronomer
of the ninth century was Al-Battani. The quality of his observa-
tions has been favorably compared with those of Hipparchus. Arab
scholars advanced mathematics in particular, introducing algebra as
an alternative to Greek geometry to solve scientiﬁc problems, and
some of their advances reentered Europe through Spain from about
the tenth century. As far as astronomy was concerned, European
intellectuals were unable to offer anything new for over a thousand
years. However, the complexity of the system inherited from Ptol-
emy, with its system of cycles and epicycles, did not escape criti-
cal comment. While watching his court astronomers struggle with
predicting the motions of the planets in the middle of the ﬁfteenth
century, King Alphonso X of Castile complained that if he had
been present at the creation, he would have suggested to the Al-
mighty a somewhat simpler arrangement. (Alphonso was respon-
sible for getting Arab and Jewish scholars, whom he had summoned
to Toledo, to produce the famous Alphonsine Tablesfor forecasting
eclipses. These tables were used for almost three hundred years.)
The end of the Arabian dominance of astronomy came in a bi-
zarre fashion. Ulugh Beg was grandson of the Asian conqueror
Tamerlane. His father had captured the city of Samarkand and gave
it to Ulugh Beg. He turned it into a city of Muslim culture and
constructed a magniﬁcent observatory there in 1428 c.e.In fact his
principal interest was astrology, rather than the furtherance of sci-
ence. He produced a horoscope that predicted that his eldest son,
Abd al Latif, would kill him. In an attempt to escape this destiny,
he banished his son from the kingdom. The disgruntled son initi-
ated a rebellion against his father, whom he ordered to be killed
(thus fulﬁlling the father’s prognostication) . As the successor ruler,
Abd al Latif destroyed much of the cultural infrastructure his father
had put in place, which he perceived as having been used against
him. Not surprisingly, later rulers were not as attracted by astrol-
ogy as had been Ulugh Beg. The era of Iranian cultural dominance
was ended.
There were ﬁve individuals who during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries ﬁnally broke the Ptolemaic stranglehold inhibiting
SERIOUS MEASUREMENTS
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Her father, who had been a brave and gallant officer, who had
served his country on many a battle-field, and loved his Tsar, the
Alexander of good deeds, with a strong and fervent love, which
nothing, not even the claims of his little daughter, could outweigh,
and who was trusted and loved in return by his Emperor, brought
the little motherless Olga, when but a child of ten, to Gatschina,
presented her to the Tsar, demanding an asylum for the pretty child,
whose mother was dead, and whose fearlessness and beauty made
her the more open to an untoward fate.
The great Alexander was pleased to gratify his faithful friend and
servant, and was also captivated by the tiny maid's rare loveliness;
and so it came about that General Naundorff's desire was granted,
and his little Olga became the pet and plaything of the Imperial
Court. There she grew from girlhood to maidenhood, and, as her
beauty developed more and more, and her intelligence expanded,
she became a special favourite with the Tsar, to whose private
apartments she had free access, and from whom she gained by her
pretty imperious pleading, many a coveted favour for some loyal
subject of his Majesty.
The news came of her father's death, but it made little difference to
Olga; she had scarcely known him, she could not be expected to
weep for one she did not love. Her first real sorrow fell upon her
when by the hand of an assassin, the kind and gracious Alexander
II. passed from life to death. Her grief was inconsolable then; she
wept for days and nights, and mourned him with a deep abiding
sorrow, that fostered and strengthened her hate and abhorrence of
those who, while calling themselves Russians and patriots, planned
secretly, and in the dark, for the overthrow of the Imperial throne.
She was grown a woman then, and a rarely beautiful one, with her
fair proud face with its touch of royal scorn, and her free, upright,
graceful form. It was at this time that Vladimir Mellikoff first saw her,
and claiming distant cousinship, proceeded straightway to fall in love
with her and worship her; a worship she accepted as a right, but a
love which she only tolerated with indifference.

When the new Tsarina formed her personal Court, she named Olga
as maid of honour, and when first the young girl entered on her
duties, received her with such winning sweetness and graciousness,
as to subdue utterly the proud heart, and cause it to transfer to the
young and still lovely woman all its treasure of intense veneration,
affection, and allegiance which it had held for the beloved Alexander.
Count Mellikoff, meantime, succeeded but poorly in his suit; Olga
was neither touched nor won by his persistency; she accepted his
homage and his passionate devotion with her superb Imperial grace,
but granted him nothing in return, save perhaps when she saw him
wavering and uncertain, torn between his love and his self-respect,
then she would bestow on him a smile of dazzling softness, or let
her slim firm fingers rest a moment within his, or murmur some half
inaudible word of praise or protest, when he would be again at her
feet, her slave, her adorer, her passionate lover.
He had spoken out his love at last, and urged his claims upon her so
vehemently and with such emotional force, as to rouse her even
from her habitual indifference, and to call forth that half promise, on
account of which Vladimir had started on his new mission with such
an exulting heart and such visions of glorified future bliss.
There was one habitué of the Court, however, whom Olga often
favoured with her rare smiles, and in whose company she always
appeared frankly content; this was Ivor Tolskoi, in whose fair good
looks she took honest pride, and for whom she laid aside something
of her haughty, imperious manner. Indeed, Ivor was so bright and
joyous, such an incarnation of the brilliant sparkling cold sun of
Petersburg, which exhilarates but does not warm, it was impossible
not to like him, and not to melt under the cool fire of his blue eyes,
and the fine if cruel smile of his lips; only Olga failed to see the
coldness or the cruelty.
She fancied she knew Ivor Tolskoi's life from Alpha to Omega, that
there was not a page of his daily existence that was not open to her
inspection, and yet she in reality knew nothing; not even his daily

avocations, beyond the light ones imposed upon him by Court
regulations, and never dreamed that he was one of the most vigilant
and most active members in the secret service of the Chancellerie.
Indeed, Ivor Tolskoi's boyish face and youthful laugh seemed
incompatible with intrigue and surveillance; and Ivor knew this, and
took good care to play both his rôles with diplomatic finesse and
success.
"And so, Ivor," Olga was saying in her clear, cold voice, "you really
believe that that wretched woman of the bourgeoisie had a hand in
the murder of poor Stevan Lallovich? Upon my word, to what heights
will the canaille next aspire, if even a Prince of Russia is not safe
from the stab of a knife in the hand of a red republican? Do you
think she murdered him, Ivor?"
"Ah," replied Tolskoi, "you put a blunt question, Mdlle. Naundorff,"
for though Olga addressed him with the familiarity of a sister, Ivor
never so far forgot himself as to reply in like manner. "How dare one
express any opinion on any subject in these days of treachery, since
the very walls have ears and the very doors speak? And even should
you press me, mademoiselle, I could not answer; I never have any
opinion on any subject more important than a ball cotillon; c'est trop
de peine." And Ivor threw back his head and laughed, his full and
hearty peal, at sound of which several of the other guests of the
salon stopped their idle occupations and laughed in sympathy. But
Olga frowned and beat her pointed slipper impatiently against the
foot-stool on which it rested.
"Don't be silly, Ivor," she said; "and don't laugh so loud, you will
have old Madame Bettcheriski down upon us for breach of etiquette.
When will you cease to be such a boy?"
"When I cease to sun myself in your smiles, mademoiselle," replied
the young man, gallantly, and with a half-mocking bow. "When that
unhappy day dawns for me I shall take leave of my youth for ever,
and seeing it fall from me, grow as 'grave and reverend a signior' as
Count Vladimir himself."

To this allusion to her absent lover, Olga made no rejoinder save by
a scarcely perceptible upward movement of her head. She waited a
moment before she spoke again, and in the silence that fell between
them, there floated across the room the conclusion of a sentence,
spoken in a musical though rather high-pitched voice:
"It is true, nevertheless. She may not care for him, but when he
returns to Court our proud and haughty favourite will be prepared to
bestow her hand upon him."
Then the speaker's voice faded away into space, and Olga looking
up found Ivor's eyes fixed upon her with a strange and unwonted
fierceness in their blue depths. Her own fell beneath his glance, and
she felt with annoyance the blood rise in her face, and spread its
crimson over her pale cheeks.
She was angry at this school-girl exhibition, and drew herself upright
into a more dignified attitude, folding her hands on her knees, and
looking up boldly into Ivor's face; as she did so the colour faded as
quickly as it had come, leaving her paler than before. Tolskoi
continued to gaze at her intently; he bent forward a little, bringing
his golden head nearer her dark one, and said, in a voice quite
different from his usual gay insouciant tones:
"It is my turn to ask a question. Is this true, mademoiselle?"
"Is what true?" replied Olga, under her breath, half fascinated by the
face and eyes looking down so close upon her; a face that bore the
familiar lineaments of Ivor, but with an expression she had never
seen there before, and which made this very familiarity seem
strange and repellent.
"Is it true," repeated Ivor, in the same low voice, "that when Count
Vladimir Mellikoff returns—if he returns—Mademoiselle Naundorff
will bestow upon him the honour of her hand? Is it true? For that is
the reading between the lines, is it not? Our Court recognises but
one proud favourite, mademoiselle, and who should know her name
so well as you? At present she lacks but one courtier in her train,

Count Vladimir. You see the riddle is not difficult of solution; but is it
true—Olga?"
It was the first time he had ever called her by her name, and
Mademoiselle Naundorff winced perceptibly as she heard it fall from
his lips, in the low suppressed tones of his voice. She started, and
threw back her head with her favourite gesture, as if she would
throw off the burden of the hour, and free herself from its
restrictions.
"Have you a right to ask, Ivor?" she answered, coldly. "How can you
be so foolish as to heed a bit of incomplete gossip, blown to us from
the lips of Countess Vera, light as feather-down, and without
beginning or end, as are most of the Countess's scandals?"
"You may laugh at me if it pleases you," replied the young man,
brusquely; "but I will have my answer. Is it true?"
"Will have—and to me!" cried out Mademoiselle Naundorff, hasty
anger in her voice, then laughing a little. "You deserve to be
punished for your temerity. What—since you will have it so, Ivor—
what if to oblige you I admit that perhaps when Count Mellikoff
returns, if I see my way to it, and am not too bornée or fatigued, I
may—what is the happy phrase?—bestow my hand upon him. There,
you have your answer, sir."
She leant back again against the cushions, and scrutinised him
through her half-closed eyelids. Ivor's face was white with passion;
his blue eyes seemed made of steel, so hard and brilliant was their
lustre. He did not move from his position, or take his gaze from her
face, and when he spoke it was with no outburst of anger or
eloquence, but in the same repressed low voice.
"Then I warn you, Olga, let him take heed, for you shall never give
to him what I know you would refuse to me. Should he dare to
boast of you as won by him, I will make him eat his own words,
even though it be with a knife of steel."

Olga shuddered involuntarily, but controlling herself quickly, said
quietly, with a little laugh: "You speak at random, my poor Ivor;
what wish of yours have I disregarded, or what request left
unfulfilled? Is there anything more I can do for you?"
But Tolskoi was not to be put off with light words or meaningless
phrases; his face did not relax, nor a softer expression come to his
eyes, at her bantering words, though he spoke somewhat less
harshly.
"Yes, you can give me one thing more; you can give me your
promise never to marry Vladimir Mellikoff without my consent. Will
you promise me this, Olga?"
Mdlle. Naundorff was now, however, thoroughly roused; she sprang
to her feet and drew up her tall figure to its full height, while the
proud lines of her face became prouder and more imperious, and
her voice vibrated with suppressed anger, though her tones fell calm
and cold.
"Certainly not, Monsieur Tolskoi; you presume too far on good
fellowship. I make no promise to you, or any one, that shall control
my free actions; what you ask is preposterous, Ivor, preposterous."
"Then I will kill him," said Tolskoi, quite calmly, and without any
extraordinary vehemence in his voice or manner; "I will kill him."
And as Olga drew back, startled at his unexpected reply, he bent
forward and caught her hand in his.
"Remember what I say, Olga; if he presumes to think that he has
won you, or dares to say so, or if I learn in any way that you are his
promised wife, I will kill him. He shall not possess what I would give
my life to gain, and what you know would be refused me."
Then he dropped her hand, and before Olga could recover from her
surprise, had passed down the long salon, and through the open
portières into the great corridor that led to the palace court-yard.

Olga remained for some moments dazed and astonished, trying in
vain to reconcile the Ivor of the past with the Ivor of the moment,
wondering vaguely at his strange words and altered aspect. She had
known for some months that he made no secret of his devotion to
her, but he had always urged his admiration upon her in such a
happy half-bantering fashion, she only regarded it as a boy's ardour,
nor took him more seriously than his youthful face and careless
manner demanded.
He had, indeed, once hinted at a deeper feeling, but she had
laughed and told him not to burn his fingers with fire, and he, after
a moment's annoyance, had laughed with her, and returned to his
old openly expressed adoration.
But now, within this last half-hour, she had seen below the surface of
that gay exterior, and she drew back half alarmed, half fascinated at
what she beheld there. And although she had had her eyes opened
to the other side of Ivor's nature, she had ruled and controlled men
too long, seen them become her willing and abject slaves at a mere
smile or word too often, to give much weight to Tolskoi's threat; it
amused her rather than terrified her.
"Poor Ivor," she mused; "how very melodramatic, and how youthful!
I must get you into better training, Ivor, or we shall have you really
committing some foolish escapade, and mixing my name up in it, in
a way I should not care for."
Then she turned from the window, and as she did so came her
summons to the Empress, and hastening to obey the command she
forgot Ivor entirely, or remembered him only to say half vexedly:
"After all he told me nothing about Count Stevan's murder. Oh,
tiresome Ivor!" And thus she dismissed him, and all other annoying
subjects, with but scant courtesy.

CHAPTER XI.
A WOMAN SCORNED.
When Count Vladimir Mellikoff drew back the portières that shrouded
the doors of the large drawing-room at the Folly, he came face to
face with Miss Rosalie James, and for a full moment these two gazed
at each other in a silence that might have been born either of
unexpectedness, or preconcerted arrangement.
Count Mellikoff never allowed ordinary emotions to be visible in his
face; he had that absolute control of feature and muscle which only
long training and an inflexible will can effect. It is seldom one comes
across such a countenance, over which no appreciable change ever
passes, and upon which the passions leave no reflex, not even the
slightest shadow, such as troubles a pool when a cloud passes
overhead, that is gone even as one watches its approach. Such a
countenance betokens one of two temperaments: a nature too weak
and vacuous to feel or comprehend any master passion, and which
from very inanition becomes irresponsive, or one so strong and so
intense as to fear its own capabilities, and therefore strives to
conceal all outward expression, lest its lightest emotion might exhibit
something more than the usual conventionalities.
Of the latter type was Vladimir Mellikoff. From his boyhood he had
taught himself the value of repression, and in it had found his
greatest power. He had learned to so utterly subdue all outward
expression of the passion that at the moment might be consuming
him, as to remain absolutely passive under the most trying
circumstances, and so to control his every feature, that not one
muscle, not so much as the trembling of his lips or the lifting of his
eyebrows, ever betrayed him, when it was his will that they should
not.

And yet, perhaps, the greatest charm that he possessed was the
sudden and unexpected brilliancy or softness which he at times
allowed his countenance to assume; then all the harsh, decisive lines
faded from about his mouth and eyes, the stern rigidity of chin and
brow relaxed, the gravity of the dark eyes, in their deep settings,
grew tender, and the expression of melancholy harshness melted
beneath the sweetness of his smile.
Olga Naundorff, who knew him so well, had seen this change in him
more often than any one, yet even to her it was always new and
startling, and filled her with a certain feeling of amazement, not
unmixed with pity. For to Olga, the beautiful, as to her Imperial
ancestress, men and men's passions were but playthings of the hour,
and should, like all mechanical toys, be perfectly regulated by
ingenious clockwork, warranted never to get out of order, and never
to carry their cleverness beyond certain boundaries. If any one of
her puppets over-stepped these, and showed signs of
unconventional or barbaric passion, she lifted her dark brows in
astonishment, raised her proud head a trifle more haughtily, and
with superb disdain reduced the poor bungler to his proper state of
imbecility, and then passed him by ever after with an intensity of
quiet scorn, that killed by slow but sure degrees.
To her mind all passion was vulgar, and to be vulgar was to write
one's self down a fool; fools had no place in her world. They might
be of use in some other part of the globe, that was not her affair; to
her they were bores, and bores, as we all know, are obnoxious
pests; away with them, let them be anathema. Life is too short to
expend any portion of it on emotions that ruin the digestion and
spoil the most perfect complexion.
For one entire moment Miss James and Count Vladimir looked full in
one another's faces, and in that moment each pair of dark eyes read
something in the other that caused them both to sink
simultaneously, while over the girl's cheeks a faint dull red rose and
faded.

The half smile, mocking yet satisfied, that had come to Count
Mellikoff's lips as he picked up the bit of lace and muslin from beside
Patricia's chair, still lingered, and now it deepened somewhat, as
with a bow he stepped back, holding aside the heavy draperies, and
by an almost imperceptible gesture commanded Miss James to enter.
She obeyed him, and as the thick plush curtains fell behind her with
a dull rustle, they seemed to her excited fancy to shut her out for
ever from the gaiety and freedom of the life she had quitted only a
moment ago, even as they shut her within the deserted drawing-
room, with Vladimir Mellikoff as her only companion.
She laughed nervously and put her hand up to her throat as she did
so, trying in vain to shake off the absurd superstitious feeling that
was creeping over her, and that seemed to enfold all her senses and
render her acquiescent and obedient to the will of this tall dark man,
who stood before her, and whose distinguished face, with its burning
eyes and compressed lips, fascinated her, as the serpent fascinates
the dove. She could even think of this simile, and in her heart laugh
at it, but she could not shake off, or overcome the fact of his
mesmeric influence upon her.
Count Mellikoff drew a low causeuse towards her, and with grave
politeness begged her to be seated. She sank down upon it with
passive obedience, and folding her hands on her knees looked up at
him; she held a marquise fan of ostrich plumes, these trembled
somewhat; it was the only sign of emotion that escaped her.
Vladimir turned from her and walked the length of the drawing-
room, standing for a moment at the entrance to the conservatory,
where lived the golden-hued Maréchal Niel roses; their pungent yet
faint perfume permeating the atmosphere, while their heavy heads
drooped with the burden of their own loveliness, half hidden in the
tender green of their leaves.
As he walked away from her, Rosalie roused herself from the strange
lethargy that had subdued her; she threw back her head, her breath
came quickly, a flush crept up and stained the olive pallor of her

cheeks; she opened her hands, throwing them out with an impatient
gesture, and the marquise fan fell noiselessly at her feet, the waving
feathers making a light breeze as they fluttered down that touched
her face and lifted the laces of her low corsage.
The over-strained tension of her nerves gave way; she could have
cried for very relief and joy as she felt the spell of his presence
failing at the return of her powerful will. She watched him eagerly
and saw him enter the rose house; as his dark figure vanished in the
interior gloom she jumped up quickly, threw up her arms, and drew
a long deep breath; took a step or two forward, and noticing the
fallen fan stooped to pick it up, then turned to leave the room by a
side entrance. As she did so Vladimir Mellikoff stood before her,
holding a golden-hued rose between his fingers.
She started back, she was almost terrified by his sudden
reappearance; she had not heard his approach, his footsteps were
noiseless on the heavy carpet; she imagined him safe in the alleys of
the conservatory, and her escape from him but the effort of a
moment. She had but stooped to recover her fan, and lo, there he
stood, tall and commanding and smiling, before her. She gazed at
him questioningly, and again, as her glance met his inscrutable dark
eyes, she recalled the old fable of the serpent and the dove. She
sank down upon the causeuse trembling.
"Mademoiselle," Count Vladimir's courteous, cool tones were saying,
"will you honour me by the acceptance of this rose? The royal flower,
par excellence, over all other flowers, as one of your own English
writers, John Ruskin, says. If I may be permitted to suggest so bold
an idea, it will enhance, and be enhanced, by a place in your
corsage."
He held out the flower, smiling as he did so, and she took it
mechanically, and fastened it amidst the black laces that draped her
shoulders and bosom; it dropped its golden head lovingly upon
them, while its perfume rose and fell with the pulsations of her
heart.

Vladimir drew a chair opposite to her and sat down, leaning forward
with his elbows on his knees, and his keen eyes noting each
fluctuating expression of her face, each flutter of the laces above her
unquiet breast, each nervous movement of her hands in their long,
loose Suède coverings. He had a dangerous game to play, and upon
his success or defeat depended his winning or losing Olga. As her
name crossed his mind, though not spoken by his lips, he was
shaken by a sudden passion of love and desire; he recalled her
proud, pale beauty, the blue of her eyes, "blue as the violets of his
own Novgorod," the golden sheen of her hair, her lissom figure, and
her cold haughty smile.
He would win her, or he would die; and what mattered any other
woman's life if he could but appear worthy in her eyes? What had
the chief said? "You must use a woman's weapons—finesse, deceit,
distrust—when you make war upon a woman." Well, and so he
would; it should go hard with him if he could not fit himself out in a
woman's armour, and not reveal where the breast-plate failed to
meet, or the helmet bound his forehead too tightly. One must put up
with such little inconveniences when one adapts oneself to the
warfare of the weaker sex.
"Above all, distrust the women of the great world, they are our
cleverest enemies;" that had been another of Patouchki's axioms;
and he did distrust this pale, dark-eyed, slight American girl with
every fibre of his mind, and read her through and through; her
shallow cleverness, her dwarfed ambitions, her stunted love, that
was not so much love as a mixture of baffled pride and jealousy, and
desire of conquest. She could be useful to him; he had decided that
within the dinner-hour, when he caught her suspicious glances, cast
first at Philip Tremain, as he sat on Mrs. Newbold's left, and then at
Miss Hildreth, who, radiant and handsome, was eating olives, and
mystifying George Newbold, on whose right hand she was placed.
He had read Miss James's secret then and there, and resolved that it
should be useful to him, and that she should be the tool in his
master-hand wherewith to work.

Rosalie in due course had been presented to him, and she had not
failed to notice and feel flattered by his attentions to her. She was
smarting under Mr. Tremain's too apparent indifference, and
Patricia's too evident power. She longed to strike both the one and
the other, to tear off the masks from their serenely smiling faces,
and hold them up to the scorn and derision of their world.
"I hate them both," she murmured between her teeth. "I hate him
because he loves her still, and I hate her because she is so beautiful
and so victorious. I know there is some secret well hidden behind
that lovely face, and oh, what would I not give to find it out and
reveal it!"
It was at this moment that George Newbold's lazy voice interrupted
her thoughts, and looking up she saw him leaning towards her with
the distinguished appearing foreigner beside him. Mr. Newbold
mumbled out two names and left them, and Rosalie glancing up
again met the Count's steady dark eyes fixed upon her, and knew
with sudden certainty that he had read her face only too well; how
much more that lay beneath the surface of her outward seeming not
even she could tell!
They stood quite silent for several moments, and during that time
she felt imperceptibly at first, and then more and more certainly, his
influence and power growing upon her; she acknowledged the
intensity of his glance without daring to meet it, and could have
cried for rage at her own inability to throw off the fascination he
exercised over her. When he spoke it was upon a commonplace
topic, and she drew a sigh of relief when, after a brief conversation,
he bowed and left her, even though conscious of a vague regret that
he should go from her.
During the evening she had many times felt his eyes seek her out
and rest for a moment on her face, and at each such occurrence the
blood had rushed to her cheeks, and she had trembled, though not
with cold. He had stood a long time talking with Mr. Tremain, and
she had watched them with a half-formed anticipation of some

coming and unexpected catastrophe, and then, when she turned
and sought to leave the room, she heard a quiet voice say, "Permit
me," the door was opened for her, and as she expressed her thanks
Count Vladimir bowed, and returned to his place beside Philip. And
now they were once more together and alone, and she was again
conscious of an ever-increasing apprehension; the prescience of
some coming evil in which they were both to bear a part, and yet
which she was powerless to avert.
"Mademoiselle," said Count Vladimir, bending a little more forward
and looking up at her from under his dark brows, "I am about to do
something which under ordinary circumstances and with an ordinary
audience would be considered not only indiscreet but
unconventional. If I misjudge my opportunity and my audience and
offend you by putting you outside the pale of weak worshippers of
conventional cult, pray say so at once, and I will humbly beg your
pardon and withdraw."
For answer she drew her fingers once or twice across the feathers of
her fan, and let her eyes travel slowly up from that pretty toy to his
face, taking in as they did so the smallest detail of his appearance,
from the thin long-fingered hands, that hung down so quietly
between his knees, the dead gold of the one ring he wore with its
blazing ruby, to the tiny red rosette of an officer of the Legion of
Honour that decorated his correct evening costume. As she raised
her eyes still higher they met his, and for an infinitesimal space of
time held hers captive; then she dropped them again, and sinking
back against the cushions of her chair, raised the feather fan until it
rested against her lips. Her voice was quiet when she replied,
though a fine ear might have caught a suspicion of fear in it:
"You flatter me, Count Mellikoff; to be considered above one's world
in virtue or in vice is always a distinction, if not always an honour.
Pray in what indiscretion can I be of help to you?"
"I will tell you frankly, mademoiselle, that I am visiting this country
for two purposes and in two characters. It has struck me that as one

part of my work is that of reparation, a woman of my own world, of
quick perceptions, nice judgment, and unerring instinct might, and
could, materially assist me in my self-imposed task. I know the
generosity of women, and I know how quick they are to respond to
any tale of wrong or outrage; perhaps it is the very conventionalities
of their lives which hedge them in, from birth to marriage, that
increases their spontaneous desire to see wrongs righted, and the
criminal brought to justice. I do not know, that is a question of
analysis into which I cannot enter; I may have my theories, but need
not bore you with them. The result of the present system is made
plain to me by the women of my own country, where no rule or
restriction is ever relaxed on any pretence, and where the world and
the world's dogmas are worshipped with a blind and absolute faith.
And yet, mademoiselle, even there I have known the fairest and
highest born women, when occasion required, shake off the chains
of custom and stand forth boldly in defence of right and justice."
"That, Count Mellikoff, it seems to me any woman would do, no
matter what her nationality, if the object of her enthusiasm was
worthy in her eyes. It is not to an American girl that you should
plead for liberty of thought and action, since we have grown up
upon the very soil that once was baptized in blood, shed by our
forefathers to gain this very freedom of opinion."
"It is a grand country," replied Vladimir, slowly, and without banter or
sarcasm in his tone, "I admire it already, though as yet but a
stranger, and it is for that very reason that I shrink from one part of
my task. Mademoiselle, when one has been courteously received,
and hospitably entertained, one hesitates to strike a blow at those
who have so trusted one. The Arabs read us a lesson in moral ethics,
which we children of a latter-day civilisation would do well to follow.
He who breaks bread with the child of the desert is ever after
protected by him and his tribe. Not so with us, treachery is our
watchword, ingratitude our pass key."
He spoke somewhat bitterly, though without changing his position or
expression, and Miss James, as she looked searchingly at him, could

discover no corresponding reflexion of words in face or eyes.
"Has your experience been of such a character?" she asked, a little
abruptly.
"Both my experience and actions will bear me out in my
asseverations," he replied; and then in rather a lighter tone he
continued: "It is rather the fault of our nineteenth century progress,
mademoiselle, that we have neither time nor inclination for the old-
fashioned courtesies and amenities of our grandsires' days; we make
boast of our honesty and truth, it is true, and we are brutal often in
enforcing these virtues; we cry out against and disclaim the gentler
methods, and say with satisfied arrogance that fine phrases have no
truth, polite aphorisms no depth; well, perhaps we are right, but for
my part I prefer a well-turned and politely-worded lie, knowing it to
be such, than the brute force of to-day's truthfulness. Honesty and
honour have such elastic definitions, it is difficult to know where the
one degenerates into mendacity, or the other becomes contention.
"Let us, however, leave useless analysis, mademoiselle, and with
your permission, I will become personal. I am selfish in doing so,
because I desire to interest you in myself and my work."
He drew back a little as he spoke, and lifted his arms from his knees,
bringing his face more on a level with hers. Rosalie watched him
with the same indefinable interest and fascination that had first
subdued her. She did not speak, but her eyes sought his and rested
there, and the heavy golden flower upon her bosom rose and sank
hurriedly.
"Have I your permission, mademoiselle?" he asked.
She bowed her head, making an affirmative gesture with her hand;
the feather fan lay still upon her lap.
"You have heard," he began, "that I am here in two characters. I
come in the ordinary way to visit a great country, for which my own
land has always entertained a friendly feeling; I come to inspect her

institutions, her educational universities, her great cities, her fine
rivers; I come to admire and to learn, and to carry back with me
pleasant recollections of a too-hospitable and charming people. That
is I, in my proper aspect, without disguise or concealment; but that
is not my first object, or my real errand. Mademoiselle, I come to
seek, to trace, to find—a woman. One who has flown to your
country for protection, to escape the penalty of crime; who is a
fugitive from justice, and who thinks, poor fool! thus to avoid the
power and the vengeance of Russia. Mademoiselle, it is in this work
I ask your assistance."
As he spoke, Miss James had risen to her feet, and now stood before
him, her face blanched and haggard, her eyes glowing dark and
angry, her breath coming quick and short; her arms hung straight
down by her sides, the loose gloves falling about the thin wrists and
leaving bare the slender arms; the feather fan lay unheeded at her
feet.
"Why do you ask me, Count Mellikoff?" she cried, in a strained,
harsh voice, her eyes never leaving his face. "Why do you ask me to
help you to track a woman, to hunt a fugitive, a poor, wretched,
heart-broken fugitive, no doubt flying for her life from your cruel
country and its cruel laws? What do you see in me that makes you
think I will lend myself to your mad schemes? What am I that you
should so count upon my co-operation?"
She stopped, and Vladimir, who had also risen and stood facing her,
cool and unmoved, bent down and, lifting up the marquise fan,
handed it to her with a bow before he replied. When he spoke his
voice was keen and sharp, his words cutting and cruel.
"What do I see in you, mademoiselle? Nay, let me rather answer
your question by a line from an English poet:
'I see—a woman scorned——'
How does the couplet end?"

But Miss James made him no reply, her hands closed vehemently on
the fan she held; under their pressure the frail pearl sticks snapped
in two and fell apart. She looked at him fixedly; the crimson blood
had rushed in a torrent to her face, and the red stain lingered there.
Suddenly she faltered, trembled, swayed a little, and sinking down
upon the low causeuse, covered her face with her hands and burst
into long-drawn sobs and tears.
It was late that night before Miss James sought her own room; as
she passed out of the drawing-room Count Vladimir held back the
heavy portières with respectful attention, bending his head in
salutation as she went by him.
Behind her, on the velvet carpet, lay the strewn petals of a golden-
hued rose, about whose torn beauty a subtle fragrance still lingered,
and the broken pearl sticks of a marquise feather fan.

CHAPTER XII.
A PINK BILLET-DOUX.
Mr. Tremain had allowed George Newbold to take him away from
Count Mellikoff without any great regret on his part. He
acknowledged himself interested in the man and in his conversation,
and at first as he listened had almost persuaded himself that his
instinctive prejudice against him was ill-founded and narrow.
But as the Count continued in a perfectly passionless voice and with
what seemed to Philip a grim satisfaction, his circumstantial
revelations regarding Russia's power, and Russia's definition as to
what constituted fatherly protection, he felt all his original doubts
reawaken; and then he had caught that momentary, searching,
comprehensive malevolent expression which crept over Vladimir's
face, though but for a brief second, and this had strengthened him
in his dislike and suspicion.
Therefore he was glad of any excuse to leave him and return to the
more commonplace, if frivolous, topics of the ladies.
In the silence and security of his own room he had promised himself
a somewhat more satisfactory interview with Mdlle. Lamien than had
been his portion since the accident, and with this object in view had
shaken himself out of his half-mesmeric condition, and deserted the
hermitage of his cynical reflections.
But this was destined to be an evening of disappointments,
beginning with Patricia's frigid reception of him, and culminating in
the non-appearance of Mdlle. Lamien, either at dinner or afterwards
in the drawing-room. He had watched in vain for the tall dark figure,
with the falling laces half concealing the pale face and white hair, to

come gliding in unnoticed, and take the accustomed place within the
arched chimney-recess, the slender hands, clasped loosely together,
resting on the black dress, the passionless repose of attitude
marking a mind far away from the gay surroundings of the Folly.
He grew impatient at her absence, for Philip was of that
temperament which, finding most things—men, women, and
opportunity—come at his bidding, resented the smallest deviation
from this rule, and chafed inwardly at so flagrant a dereliction to his
will. He desired to see Mdlle. Lamien in Patricia's presence, and with
the cool analysis of criticism, contrast her feature by feature,
attribute by attribute, with that brilliant woman of the world. It had
never entered into his reasoning that Mdlle. Lamien might frustrate
his plans by the simple device of remaining invisible. He had perhaps
imagined her presence compulsory, and since he had decided that
she was to be the object of his evening's pleasure or amusement, he
felt doubly defrauded by her absence.
Had Mdlle. Lamien desired to feed the flame of the something more
than interest already lighted in Mr. Tremain's mind concerning her,
she could not have chosen a surer method. He was piqued and
chagrined at her evident indifference. It was many years since any
advances on his part had been met by steady rebuff. He had
sustained his character of conquering hero by the very rarity of his
attentions, and it gave his sensibilities something of a moral shock to
find himself distanced by this cold indifferent woman, whose very
position made his interest in her the more anomalous.
It was ten years ago that Patricia had flouted and dismissed him.
Was he to experience like treatment at Mdlle. Lamien's hands? For
though Mr. Tremain had so far scarcely admitted the nature of the
interest that Mimi's governess inspired in him, he was yet candid
enough to give it a somewhat warmer title than mere curiosity in the
study of a new character.
Patricia had distinctly repulsed him, though he had met her with the
old love ready to reawaken at the first sign of desire on her part.

Very well then, let Patricia see that he too was heart-whole and as
indifferent to her as she to him. And then Mdlle. Lamien had failed
to work up to his cue, and Philip felt his sharpest weapon was thus
taken from him, while Patricia triumphed in her insolence and
beauty.
The theatricals were to take place in the bijou gem of a theatre
which George Newbold had had put up to please Esther, in the first
year of their marriage. It was a perfect model in miniature of La
Scala, at Milan, hung throughout with the softest shade of rose silk,
a daring innovation of Esther's, which rather outvied the classic
columns and severe arches, but which added a charming air of
comfort and luxury, and was as Dick Darling said, "quite far and
away the most fetching thing for the complexion."
The stage was fitted completely with all possible and impossible
"properties," and opened at the back into the other end of the rose-
house, the opposite door of which led into the drawing-room. It was
indeed a royal playhouse, and acting upon its boards became a
luxurious fine art.
When Mr. Tremain entered the auditorium, he found the first two
rows of stalls half filled by the house guests; Patricia had betaken
herself and her train of admirers to one of the boxes, where she sat
radiant and lovely, the soft rose colouring of the hangings casting a
delicious tint upon her fair face and upon the shimmering surface of
her dress. Philip was at once conscious of her presence, but passed
her by apparently unnoticed, and made his way to the front row,
where sat Esther Newbold and Dick Darling, with an empty fauteuil
beside the former.
Into this Mr. Tremain slipped carelessly, and with the familiarity of
good-fellowship, lifted the great bouquet of roses and hyacinths that
lay unheeded on Esther's lap. Dick Darling leant over and nodded
her brown head at him, while Mrs. Newbold gave him one of her
sweet smiles, but laid her fingers on her lips in token of silence, for
Box and Cox held the stage, and Miss James was entering into the

spirit of Mrs. Bouncer with a verve and sprightliness, seemingly
incompatible with her usual irresponsive superciliousness.
The absurd farce played itself out amidst the chilling reproofs of Mr.
Robinson, and the plaudits of the spectators, until at last the curtain
dropped upon the final scene. Philip turned then to Mrs. Newbold,
and restoring her flowers to her, said:
"A propos of nothing, Esther, whose exquisite taste is one supposed
to praise in the arrangement of your posy?"
"Ah," said Mrs. Newbold, smiling again, and touching the great
jacqueminots caressingly with her fingers, "I am very proud of my
bouquet, and I will give you three guesses, Philip, at the donor's
name."
"Yes," broke in Dick Darling, quickly, "and I'll bet you three to five
you don't guess it!"
"Those are very certain odds, Miss Dick," replied Mr. Tremain,
laughing, "considering that never in the course of my long and
varied experience have I been known to elucidate the simplest
rebus. Even 'when is a door not a door?' is beyond my mental
powers; how then can I be expected to divine who is the latest slave
to Mrs. Newbold's charms? I must say however, I consider George a
very amiable young man."
"So do I," laughed Esther. "Now could a wife say more? But your
three guesses, Mr. Tremain."
"Miss Darling must put up the stakes first," answered Philip, "I am
not going to bring my powerful legal mind to bear on this problem
without first seeing the stakes. Now then, Miss Dick, out with them."
"Oh, but I have positively nothing," cried Dick Darling, her face
flushed and eager. "What could I possibly have worth Mr. Tremain's
'cheese'?"

"My dear Dick!" exclaimed Esther, "you really must get out a
dictionary of your own terms; your expressions, I am sure, are
nowhere to be found in Lindley Murray."
"Poor old duffer!" replied the incorrigible Dick, "I hope not indeed. I
guess some of them would make his hair curl, even in the cold cold
grave."
Philip laughed, and Esther tried to look scandalised, but failed
utterly; and then Mr. Tremain said, bending slightly forward:
"You might put up that tantalising little note, Miss Dick, that is half
stowed away in your laces. I am perfectly sure it contains 'some
scandal of Queen Elizabeth,' which would amply repay me for my
unwonted efforts, if I win it. Its very colour betrays it; whoever
heard of a pink billet-doux that was not redolent of intrigue? The
more bashful the colour, the more gigantic the scandal."
"What, this?" replied Dick, taking out a small square envelope, rose-
tinted and crested. "Oh, no, this would not be worth your powder;
it's only a note from Mdlle. Lamien, and doesn't contain a cent's
worth of intrigue, Mr. Tremain."
"Then its looks belie it," said Philip, "for it fills me with apprehension.
Let me look at it, Miss Dick, perhaps its tangible presence may allay
my terrors."
But Dick only shook her head, and held the little note still further
away.
"No, no," she cried, "it's not for you, Mr. Tremain, and I'm not going
to give you even so much as a 'glim' at it." Saying this, she put it
back in her dress, and smiled at Philip provokingly.
"I will put up this," she exclaimed, holding out her arm, on which a
ruby and diamond butterfly sparkled in a bangle setting; "and I am
sure it's simply angelic of me, for this is my one and only piece of
bang-up jewellery; all real and no imitation, worth double the

money. Now, Mr. Tremain, three guesses out of five; and oh, ye
gods, protect my cherished bauble!"
She swung the pretty ornament between her finger and thumb, and
the light from the wax-candles in the girandoles caught at it eagerly,
as it shot forth rays tipped with rainbow gleams.
Mr. Tremain sat back with a mock air and sigh of fatigue, and the
two women watched him interestedly; Esther with a little smile of
amusement on her softly-tinted face, and Dick with a frown of
anxiety knitting her forehead.
"Let me consider," said Philip, reflectively, putting the tips of his
fingers together somewhat awkwardly on account of his sling, and
contemplating them attentively, "only three random shots at three-
score recognised admirers! Long odds in your favour, Miss Dick. Now
had I but the language of flowers at my tongue's end, I might be
able to make such conjunctions with the unwritten but supposable
affinities, as to read at once the hidden meaning in the subtle
juxtaposition of jacque roses and hyacinths. Question: Did the donor
know any more about their meanings than I do?"
"I can supply you with posy lore, Mr. Tremain," broke in Mrs.
Newbold, "if that will be of any assistance. Know then that the red
red rose expresses love, the hyacinth sport or play."
"Ah, the one is contradictory of the other," replied Philip. "Your
nameless admirer, Esther, could scarcely be guilty of so bold a play
upon definitions as to make game of his love by his flowers. Rather
let us suppose him ignorant of any deeper knowledge than their
price."
"I think that an equally impertinent suggestion," answered Mrs.
Newbold. "A man should never count the cost where a woman is
concerned."
"Granted, my dear Esther; in theory you are absolutely right, in
practice you are lamentably wrong. But I see wrath mantling on Miss

Dick's brow, and scorn flashing from her eyes at our persiflage; let
me appease her and make a desperate plunge into the depths of
incertitude. And first of all, to be courteous and French, I throw
away deliberately one chance in suggesting that it may have been
M. le mari who sent the flowers? Ah, no, believe me, I did not need
your silent denial, Esther, to be assured of my mistake; that would
be far too commonplace and bourgeois a reading for our ethics of
this nineteenth century. The lover sinks such attentions in the
husband, and is better employed in sending flowers to some other
man's wife, rather than to his own."
"How very cynical you can be, Philip," exclaimed Mrs. Newbold,
turning her blue eyes full upon him. "I am sure George often gives
me flowers; why, these very buds I am wearing are his gift," and she
touched some half-open blossoms that formed her bouquet de
corsage.
"That was very gallant of George," replied Mr. Tremain, gravely,
"especially as he had the arduous task of gathering them from his
own rosery, and the virtuous satisfaction of knowing that they cost
him far more than the roses of your posy cost the other fellow. Well,
let me try again. Was it Freddy Slade? I have noticed that innocent
youth casting furtive glances in your direction, Mrs. Esther, too often
of late. It is possible that his ardour may have over-stepped his
prudence and his income, and your jacques been the result."
"Wrong again, Mr. Tremain," cried Dick Darling; "oh, I do hope, with
all my soul, you may miss each time."
"Considering that I have but one chance more, that is rather
ungenerous, Miss Dick. I should not have believed so rancorous a
spirit dwelt within your breast. To wish to further humiliate a two-
thirds vanquished foe!"
"But I don't want to lose my bangle, you see," said Dick, naïvely, at
which remark both Mr. Tremain and Esther laughed, and the former
continued:

"Well, here goes my last and only try for your pretty bauble, Miss
Dick. Was it Sir Piers Tracey? To be sure it is not quite in his line, and
I never saw an Englishman yet who appreciated an American
woman's love of flowers, still it might have been Sir Piers, and in
that case George could not even try to appear jealous."
"Poor dear Sir Piers!" laughed Esther, "the idea of his sending any
one flowers! He's old enough to be one's grandfather!"
"I don't know that that makes him ineligible," answered Mr. Tremain,
"I dare say 'old Q.' and Beau Brummel showered roses upon the
youthful Esthers of their decrepitude; it isn't age, my dear Mrs.
Esther, that counts in such things, it's temperament."
"Well, in any case I am glad you have not won my bangle," cried
Dick Darling, as she slipped it over her dimpled wrist. "I always
make it a point to pay up my debts of honour on the spot, I can't
bear a 'Welcher,' so you would have been obliged to take my ruby
fly, had you been successful, Mr. Tremain, and that would have been
death to me, simply death."
"With such an alternative, Miss Dick," replied Philip, with increased
gravity, and bowing across Esther, "I am devoutly thankful to have
lost, for to have been the indirect cause of your untimely decease,
would have branded me for ever in my own eyes!"
Then Mrs. Newbold said time was up, and she must go; the Ladies'
Battle would be called in five minutes, and she was wanted behind
the scenes; was Mr. Tremain going through with his rôle?
But Philip begged off on account of his still lame wrist which he wore
bandaged and in a sling; it would be quite effort enough to act when
the real representation took place, Mr. Robinson could read his lines
and he would imbibe valuable hints from his superior method. Was
Mdlle. Lamien to take the Countess d'Autreval's part?
"No," replied Esther, fingering her roses a trifle nervously, and
looking at him from under her eyelids, "Miss Hildreth has elected to

act her own rôle at the rehearsal, consequently Mdlle. Lamien's
services will not be required. Ah, Patricia has already left her box, I
must go," she added, hastily; and with a hurried gesture she walked
towards a side exit, her pale pink draperies sweeping after her, and
making a little frou-frou with their silks and laces.
Mr. Tremain reseated himself, changing his fauteuil for the one
Esther had vacated next to Miss Darling. He leant back negligently
and turning his face towards that young lady said carelessly:
"Since we neither of us appear on the boards, Miss Dick, let us
console one another off them. By the way, where is Miss James? I
did not see her come into the theatre after her very capital bit of
acting."
"Oh, I don't know," answered Miss Darling, with a shrug of her
shoulders. "I suppose she is improving her mind somewhere, at the
expense of some one. To speak frankly, Mr. Tremain, Rosalie and I
are bad friends just now, and I give her as wide a berth as possible."
"Oh, indeed," answered Philip, rather bored, and not at all
understanding that he was the cause of this bad friendship, since
Dick, reading Rosalie's schemes and wishes, had denounced them
hotly; and Miss James, with the remembrance of Perkins's slighting
remarks still fresh, had replied with equal vigour; and so the breach
widened between them day by day.
Dick sat silent for several moments, the colour coming and going in
her cheeks; she was a very chivalrous little girl, and her whole heart
had gone out in unreasoning admiration to Patricia, when first she
saw her; her beauty, her brilliancy, her sparkling vivacity making an
absolute captive of the maiden, who, as she looked at her, felt all her
own shortcomings rise up and confront her in formidable array.
She had heard the story of Philip's and Patricia's engagement, and
its unhappy termination, and she had secretly admired him, in her
own mind, for a long time, and had felt Patricia's reception of him as
a personal injury, which she longed to put right by a few judicious

words. She felt sure they would be judicious because they would be
honest. Now if he would only name Patricia, only ask some question,
no matter how trivial, that she might introduce this one absorbing
subject.
But Mr. Tremain, with that perverted obstinacy so often displayed,
which consists in saying the wrong thing at the right moment, when
he did speak, propounded a question so diametrically opposite to
Dick Darling's thoughts that that young lady was actually taken
aback, and stared at him blankly for a full second without answering.
And yet Philip had only inquired if Miss Dick could say why Mdlle.
Lamien had not appeared that evening? It was a simple enough
question, but Miss Darling seemed incapable of replying to it, so he
spoke again.
"My dear Miss Dick, what have I said? You look as though you had
either not heard, or not understood me. Pray let me repeat myself.
Can you tell me why Mdlle. Lamien has absented herself all this
evening?"
Miss Darling by this time had come back from her vain imaginings,
and answered him readily enough.
"Oh, I beg your pardon; I guess I must have been 'in Japan' when
you first spoke. Why hasn't Mdlle. Lamien come down this evening?
For a very simple reason: she has gone away."
"Gone away!" echoed Philip. "But I saw her late this afternoon in the
corridor." He did not add, and heard her; since, if Esther Newbold
spoke truly, it was she who had startled him by her sad, monotonous
song, and her voice that had an echo of Patty's in its notes.
"Oh, no doubt," replied Miss Darling, "she only went away while we
were at dinner; I heard the wheels of the dog-cart just as we had
eaten our way up to the suprême de volaille."
"Is she to be gone long?" asked Philip, conscious and yet astonished
at the feeling of loss this news created in him.

"I really don't know," replied Dick, looking a little surprised. "She left
this note for me," taking out the pink envelope from its hiding-place
and showing it to him. He bent forward eagerly to scan it as it lay on
her outstretched palm, the superscription hidden, the reverse side
lying uppermost. On this he saw impressed a tiny coronet and a
twisted cypher, "A. de L."
"It only tells me about some fancy work she undertook for me,"
continued Dick, drawing back her hand with the note, "and thanks
me rather over much for my 'unvarying kindness.' She might stow
that," she concluded, with a grimace.
But Mr. Tremain had eyes and thoughts only for the little note, and
its dainty, aristocratic heraldry.
"Is she a titled émigrée in disguise?" he asked, pointing to the
monogram and coronet; then, with an effort, as he became aware of
Miss Darling's surprised looks, and speaking more lightly: "This
grows exciting, Miss Dick; who knows?—we may have the elements
of a three volume novel ready to our hands, yet lose them all by
blundering. What do you know about Mdlle. Lamien?"
"Only what Esther has told us all, which you heard, I think. As to her
being titled, if you think this indicates it," pointing to the
embellishments on the pink note, "why you know, they go for
nothing. It may be only a blind, or it may be that Mdlle. Lamien
prefers to write on other people's note-paper. I don't think it's very
conclusive evidence one way or the other."
And Miss Darling got up with almost an impatient air.
"I am going to change my seat," she said, "I want to go further
back, where I can better see and admire Miss Hildreth. But before I
go, Mr. Tremain, I will tell you who sent Esther the roses, it was
Mdlle. Lamien; a sentimental and too extravagant outburst of gush
on her part, wasn't it?"

Too surprised to reply, Mr. Tremain made way for Miss Darling,
escorting her to a back row, where George Newbold received her
with empressement, and Jack Howard with unqualified relief.
"Give you my word," he whispered in her ear, "I have been bored to
death, Miss Dick; so glad to have you back again!"
But Miss Darling proved very poor company, and Jack Howard for
once voted her tiresome.
"Stupid blind mole!" declared Dick to herself, as Philip made his bow
and left her. "Can't he see how lovely Patricia has grown, that he
must run after that pale Russian woman? Oh, what idiots men are!"
and Miss Darling consoled herself by reducing poor Jack to the verge
of despair by her sharp retorts and acrid replies.
Quite late in the evening, after the rehearsal was over, and the little
theatre empty, Count Vladimir opened the double doors and stepped
within Melpomene's deserted temple. The lights had not yet been
put out, and the stage scenery stood unchanged from the last act;
an air of late occupancy, and a memory of brilliant accessories, of
fair women in their sheen of jewels and gleam of satins still lingered,
to which the empty seats and deserted stage pointed the moral of all
transitory glory.
Vladimir stood for a moment contemplating the scene, a fine smile
curving his lips, the light of recent conquest lingering in his eyes.
"I am too late," he murmured; "the drama is played out seemingly,
the actors fled. Ah, well, I can afford to wait."
Then he went forward a few steps, and as he did so his quick eye
evidently detected something unexpected, for he made his way
definitely towards the back row of stalls, stooping when he came to
the last but one, and lifted from the carpet a folded square of paper.
He held it up to the light; it was an envelope, pink in hue, and
embellished on the smooth satin surface by a tiny coronet and a
twisted cypher. It was Dick Darling's rose-coloured billet-doux.

Vladimir Mellikoff made no movement of surprise or triumph, but as
he took out his black note-book and laid the envelope safely within
its pages, the smile deepened on his lips and in his eyes. He turned
and walked swiftly away, letting the double doors close noiselessly
behind him.
The little theatre was once more deserted; the wax-lights flickered in
the still air; the rose silk draperies stirred slightly as a passing breath
of soft spring wind floated in from the rose house, bringing a wave
of perfume from the golden blossoms over which it had lingered in
its passage. The mimic comedy was played out, the actors had
abandoned their rôles; only real life and its human tragedy remained
uncompleted, across which none but the Divine hand dare write the
word finis.

CHAPTER XIII.
IN THE HAZEL COPSE.
Mr. Tremain, after leaving Miss Darling in the safe custody of George
Newbold, walked hastily out of the theatre by a side entrance, and
making his way along a narrow and dimly lighted corridor, came to a
small door opening on to an outside terrace which ran beneath the
library windows, and from which a flight of steps led to the large
flower garden—Esther Newbold's particular hobby.
He stepped out on to the terrace, shutting the door behind him, and
drawing a deep breath of relief at being once more alone. It was a
charming night; the cool fresh west wind swept by him in fitful
gusts, touched with a warmer breath of the south, and laden with all
the mystery of the thousands of miles it had travelled ere it reached
this fair spot of God's creation. It could not linger to unfold its
burden of knowledge; it could but flutter its dark soft wings and pass
on in the orbit of its destiny, leaving its mystery unsolved, its secrets
unrevealed, and murmuring ever as it went, sweeping up amidst the
tall, waving trees, or bending low to caress the sleeping flowers,
telling its message always and ever—its message of the passing of
Time, of the coming of Eternity.
"The stars heard it, and the sea,
And the answering aisles of the dim woods."
Only man, whose ears are not as yet finely enough attuned to the
music of the spheres, heard no hidden meaning in its gentle voice,
no celestial trumpet-call in its rude blasts.
Why should Nature reveal her most priceless secrets to man, since
as yet, his highest attainment is a disbelief in all things beyond his

finite wisdom, and a cavilling at what he calls the useless machinery
of organic life? Nature is as shy as she is beautiful; generous when
trusted, but niggardly when discredited. How shall the wilfully blind
expect to see into her mysteries, or the wilfully deaf hear the lilt of
her charming?
Below the terrace lay the garden beds, wrapt about in a dreamy
haze, out of which the crescent moon, set high in the intense blue of
the heavens, evoked spectral gleams of gold and silver as it fell
athwart the yellow daffodils, hanging their heavy heads down to
their shrouding green sheath-like leaves; or where the sweet
narcissus raised its white disk, distilling its rich perfume far into the
night, and recalling the beautiful Bœotian youth, whose tragic fate
seemed written on each silver petal.
"Narcissi, fairest of them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness."
Here, too, blossomed the luscious double violet, hidden beneath its
close growing leaves, mingling its dainty perfume with the more
pungent exhalations of the tiny musk plant and lily-of-the-valley,
while the pale blue-eyed forget-me-not was lost in the shadows, as
were the star of Bethlehem, and the delicate classic cups of the
crocus, only their bolder yellow rims catching, now and then, a
fleeting moonbeam.
A grove of sycamore trees threw up their graceful branches against
the luminous darkness, while the chestnuts swayed their half-opened
downy pink and white buds, and the maples fluttered their long,
tendril-like pods, cased in verdant green, and as rhythmical as lightly
strung Eastern prayer-beads. The faint early verdure of the lilac was
just discernible, and in one of the dark oak-trees a little mother bird,
wakened by the brilliant moonlight, crooned out a plaintive note to
her mate, who answered her by the soft fluttering of his brown
wings.

And then all was still, but not silent; for the great wonderful night is
filled with the sweet harmonies of the invisible world, whose
cadences are too faint and tender to be heard among the clarion
chords of the day, but which possess an infinitude of euphony that
seems borrowed from the heavenly choirs of the New Jerusalem.
Mr. Tremain coming suddenly—from the artificiality of the miniature
La Scala, with its rose-coloured hangings, its wax tapers, its
atmosphere laden with the manufactured perfumes of chypre,
jockey-club, duchesse; and its stage, on which the mimic actors
travestied the passions of real life; its audience, made up of fair
women, whose costly robes were more priceless in their eyes than
the ruder virtues of truth and honour; of men, whose natural
abilities were buried beneath a fashionable languor, and whose
moral nature was stunted and undeveloped by the blighting curse of
their century, love of gold and desire of its possession—into the
immensity and candour of the night—felt as if dealt a blow, and
stopped involuntarily, swayed by some unknown emotion that strove
against the one influence and yearned towards the other.
He stepped down from the terrace, and wandered aimlessly along
the broad garden paths, his hands clasped loosely behind him, his
bare head bent forward, the April wind stirring the short brown locks
that fell over his forehead. Now and then he stooped down and
looked carefully at some half-hidden blossom, drawing back the
leaves with heedful fingers, and smiling at his own childishness as
he passed on, not rifling even one bud from the parent stem.
The garden paths were all broad and straight, and Philip walked on,
unheeding his steps and unmindful of his course. He was very deep
in thought, so deep that presently he forgot to notice the flowers on
either side, passing on without halting at any favoured one. Dick
Darling's bald news—that Mdlle. Lamien had left the Folly—and her
apparent ignorance as to her return, had opened Philip's eyes with a
start, and revealed to him the distance he had already travelled in
the primrose path of dalliance and uncertainty.

He acknowledged to himself, with a twinge of mortification, that her
leaving the house in such a manner, and without any word to him as
to her intention, was a wound to his self-love and self-esteem.
Though, indeed, why Mdlle. Lamien should have confided her plans
to him was an open question. He had met her but once face to face
since the accident, and that opportunity had resolved itself into the
unsatisfactory interview in the corridor, when she had scorned his
hand, and swept by him down the stairs without a word.
Poor Philip! it was rather rough treatment, as he said to himself, to
have his hand refused twice in the same evening by two different
women! A smile of self-scorn and amusement came to his lips as he
recalled the incident; fate was not usually so unkind, he was not
accustomed to such churlish treatment at her hands, and the very
novelty set him speculating as to the motives that incited two such
opposite natures to a similarity of action.
Self analysis is a very deceitful occupation, and Mr. Tremain, who
had set about an interior examination as to his own feelings and
intentions regarding Mdlle. Lamien, was soon wandering far afield in
the realms of speculation regarding the ulterior motives of these two
women, comparing their various attributes, contrasting their
characteristics, finding subtle likenesses between them, and
antagonistic points of approachment. Then he recalled the little pink
note, and the bouquet of jacque roses, and Dick Darling's sarcastic
criticism upon them. Why should Mdlle. Lamien use coroneted note-
paper if it was not her own? And why should Mimi's governess waste
her scanty substance upon hot-house flowers for Esther Newbold,
who certainly could better afford the luxury than her paid
dependent? And did not Mdlle. Lamien know the meaning hidden in
the blossoms? Had she some reason for selecting red roses and
white hyacinths, or was it only a coincidence, an accident?
"Were I a little more of a fatalist," thought Philip, "I should answer
my own question by reminding myself that nothing is accident in life.
In their cult, kismet overrules and becomes destiny."

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Measuring The Cosmos How Scientists Discovered The Dimensions Of The Universe David H Clark

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