Читать книгу Percival Lowell — an afterglow - Wrexie Louise Leonard - Страница 8
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ОглавлениеHis mind was, it is said, incomparably brilliant. His "mental altitudes" helped make the name Lowell illustrious. Soon after his graduation from Harvard, his cousin, James Russell Lowell, spoke of him as the "most brilliant man in Boston" and his later years brought only a fuller flowering of his early superior genius. His books have been translated into foreign languages, including even Chinese. And in his lectures: in these, as through a rift in the clouds like a star, he shone, while his audiences sat spellbound. He was a marvel to those who heard him. Many will remember that in his last lecture course before the Lowell Institute in Boston (later crystallized into permanent form), standing room was nil, and demands for admission were so numerous and insistent that repetitions were arranged for the evenings. At these repeated lectures the streets near by were filled with motors and carriages as if it were grand opera night! At the termination of this magnificent course there appeared in the Boston Transcript "Percival Lowell's Q. E. D." in which the writer said: "Lowell's lectures on Mars are among the most memorable ever delivered at that Institute, bearing his family name, which has commanded the services of the most eminent of the world's scholars in all lines of thought and research. He has bridged the gap which astronomers pointed out years ago in his revelations concerning Mars between the condition of habitability and that of being inhabited. … This is a brave and brilliant débût for the new science, or rather new department of astronomy which Professor Lowell has named 'planetology,' and which is to concern itself rather with the development and life of the planets themselves than with their external relations, their place in a system, their period of revolution, or their cosmic origin and destiny in the scheme of the universe. Is there another planet, however, upon which there is any present opportunity to pursue planetological studies with equal facilities and the probability of similarly brilliant rewards? With Mars the deductions from postulates and analogies drawn from terrestrial data and laws could be confirmed from certain visible facts. But if there be no other as promising field, Mr. Lowell's wisdom in concentrating on Mars is justified the more and the thanks of the world have been well earned by his devotion to it." A fitting appreciation this is of Dr. Lowell's masterful achievements.
Another writer referred to a page in his "Mars" as the most brilliant one in literature. He said:
" … As I was watching the planet, I saw suddenly two points like stars flash out in the midst of the polar cap. Dazzlingly bright upon the duller white background of the snow, these stars shone for a few moments and then slowly disappeared. The seeing at the time was very good. It is at once evident what the other-world apparitions were—not the fabled signal-lights of Martian folk, but the glint of ice-slopes flashing for a moment earthward as the rotation of the planet turned the slope to the proper angle; just as, in sailing by some glass-windowed house near set of sun, you shall for a moment or two catch a dazzling glint of glory from its panes, which then vanishes as it came. But though no intelligence lay behind the action of these lights, they were none the less startling for being Nature's own flash-lights across one hundred millions of miles of space. It had taken them nine minutes to make the journey; nine minutes before they reached the Earth they had ceased to be on Mars, and, after their travel of one hundred millions of miles, found to note them but one watcher, alone on a hilltop with the dawn."
Dr. Lowell lectured abroad also with distinguished effect. He addressed the Royal Institution of Great Britain; and in their native tongues spoke to large audiences in Paris and Berlin. In France he was often mistaken for a Frenchman so fluently and purely did he use the nation's language. He was also at home in Korea and Japan where he spoke and wrote with comparative ease the complicated speech of these Oriental lands. Students of his books on Japan are much impressed by his acquaintance with the psychology of the Japanese people. He had what may be named a unique faculty, that of being able to free himself for the nonce from his own Western culture, and superposing it—if you will—upon the mysticism of the Far East. He was, if one may be forgiven for putting it in that form, the "missing link" which connected and organically related the Soul of the West with the Soul of the East.
Dr. Lowell was fifty years ahead of his time as will be realized in later years by the young people who heard him lecture, and who studied the Lowell Observatory Exhibits of explorations of the heavens at Flagstaff. These exhibits, on transparencies, illuminated by transmitted light, were shown by invitation at centres of education like the American Museum of Natural History; Princeton University; Vassar College; the Boston Public Library; Brown University and elsewhere, where they aroused the enthusiasm of thousands of visitors.
These exhibits were not only beautiful but wonderful. They represented, so everyone might see, discoveries which could be made only at Flagstaff. They were the most advanced and remarkable exhibitions of the kind that the world had ever seen. Appreciated as this was by the older public, Dr. Lowell believed that the most important interest the exhibit could gain was the interest of youth. He began one of his last lectures by saying: "The value of a lecture consists not so much in the body of learning it may be able to impart as in the inspiration it gives others to pursue knowledge for themselves. Especially is this true when the lecture is delivered before an audience of youth. For those entering upon life are the most important hearers a lecturer can ever address. Youth is the period of possibilities. Then it is that the mind is open, plastic to impressions which at the same time it is most potent to retain. …
"Plasticity of mind is the premise to possibility of performance. To retain it longest is the great essential to success. For the ability to succeed has been defined as not having to stop till you get there. In this more than in any other one quality does the great man differ from his fellows: in the gift of perpetual youth. We are told that the good die young; our regret being father to the thought. But certain it is that the great die young even though they pass the Psalmist's limit of three score and ten. The plasticity of their mental makeup is the elixir of life poor Ponce de Leon sought in vain.
"This possibility confronts all of us at the threshold of our career. Not that we are all born with like endowment nor that we all can attain it later. But we can all approach nearer our goal by keeping it constantly before us through the procession of the years. Especially important is it, then, at the start to set one's mind and ambition on that which is best. In the trenchant, if trivial, words of an Ivy orator of years ago at Harvard to his classmates: 'Fellows, don't be content to sit on the fence; sit on the roof. And remember that climbing there does not safely consist in leaps and bounds but in throwing one's heart upward and then persistently pursuing it step by step.'"
