the splintered slabs of stone (on the wind-swept summit of Slieve League in Donegal) to be full of stems of fossil trees. Here, two thousand feet above the sea, lay a cake of the carboniferous rocks called millstone grit. This little remnant on the highest ground of the district demonstrated that a sheet of millstone grit once stretched over that remote part of the island, and may have extended much farther westward over tracts where the Atlantic now rolls."

The Nebular Hypothesis is a conception of such grandeur that it naturally appeals to a poet, and Tennyson has mastered it in all its significance as an indirect proof of Evolution.

They say

The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man.

The same subject is picturesquely dealt with in The Princess, where Psyche's lecture, giving an account of the origin of the world and an explanation of woman's abject place in it, is reproduced thus :-— This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling, cast

The planets; then the monster, then the man,
Tattoo'd or woaded, winter-clad in skins

Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;
As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here

Among the lowest.

Spectrum Analysis is thus alluded to in In Memoriam, xxi. :—

When Science reaches forth her arms

To feel from world to world and charms
Her secret from the latest moon.

This brings us to Astronomy. Here again the poet shows his wonted familiarity with recondite topics. He is not only fully impressed by the grandeurs of the starry heavens; he has made a study of the science, and thoroughly realises many aspects of astronomical lore which are but feebly apprehended by those who are not practical He can talk

astronomers.

Of sine and arc, spheroid and azimuth
And right ascension.

He is conversant with the relative position of the various constellations at different seasons, he has assimilated recent speculations as to the condition of the moon and surmises about the planets as homes for living creatures. He seems to have attained to a clear vision of the whole working of the solar system and its gradual decline.

Note how at the end of Maud he fixes the time of year by an astronomical description:

It fell at a time of year

When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,
And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer
And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns
Over Orion's grave low down in the West.

Orion's belt appears also in The Princess.

Like those three stars of the airy Giant's zone
That glitter burnish'd by the frosty dark,

And as the fiery Sirius alters hue

And bickers into red and emerald, shone

Their morions, wash'd with morning, as they came.

It is almost superfluous to quote the well-known couplets from Locksley Hall :

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire flies, tangled in a silver braid.

Less familiar is the comparison of a burning tower to the Aurora Borealis as it pulses among the Northern constellations :

The live North

Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor.

Many know the Pleiads, Orion, Auriga and Sirius who are not familiar with the stars here named : Tennyson is at home among them all.

Arthur's harp (Lyra), tho' summer-wan,

In counter motion to the clouds allured
The glance of Gareth.

He has seen Saturn's ring through a telescope; and just as Milton, having seen the moon through the telescope of Galileo, utilised his experience for poetic purposes, so Tennyson finds an observation of that kind too good to be thrown away. Consequently we have in The Palace of Art the following :

Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade
Sleeps on his luminous ring.

A few other passages may be cited :

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the Polar Star.

This is the poetic rendering of midnight. Again, the Princess was

liker to the inhabitants

Of some clear planet close upon the sun.

Till this outworn Earth be dead as yon dead world the moon.

We have by no means exhausted Tennyson's science, yet we have covered most of the ground, except that we have not dealt separately with his

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