Indeed, if we examine the most ancient of histories, we find one great fact at the base of all their philosophies. Moses connects darkness with a void and formless earth, and light with the creation of harmony and life. Menis sings of a fearful world by “many formed darkness encircled,” and links the idea of a “life-breathing divinity” with the awakening of light upon created things. The Egyptian Isis, the Grecian Apollo, who, The Lord of boundless light Ascending calm o’er the empyrean sails, And with ten-thousand beams his awful beauty veils, the fire-worshipper of the Persian hills and the sun-god of the Peruvian mountains, exhibit, through time and space, the full consciousness of man to the influences of solar light and heat upon the organic creations of which he is himself the chief exemplar. The investigations of modern philosophers have extended these influences to the inorganic masses which constitute the Planet EARTH:--and we now know that the physical forces, ever active in determining the chemical condition and the electrical relations of matter, are directly influenced by the solar radiations. Few things within the range of our inquiry are more striking than the phenomena of calorific radiation and absorption. They display so perfectly the most refined system of order, and exhibit so strikingly the admirable adaptation of every formation to its particular conditions, and for its part in the great economy of being, that they claim most strongly the study of all who would seek to discover a poetry in the inferences of science. Owing to the nature of our atmosphere, we are protected from the influence of the full flood of solar heat. The absorption of caloric by the air has been calculated at about one-fifth of the whole in passing through a column of 6,000 feet. This estimate is, of course, made near the earth’s surface; but we are enabled, knowing the increasing rarity of the upper regions of our gaseous envelope in which the absorption is constantly diminishing, to prove, that about one-third of the solar heat is lost by vertical transmission through the whole extent of our atmosphere.[47]