EBOOK WATCHERS OF THE SKY ***
Produced by Beth L. Constantine, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE TORCH-BEARERS
WATCHERS OF THE SKY
BY
ALFRED NOYES
PREFATORY NOTE
This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a
trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of
scientific discovery has its own epic unity--a unity of purpose and
endeavour--the single torch passing from hand to hand through the
centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour,
the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant
order--sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole
world of thought--have an intense human interest, and belong
essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these
moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible
attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after
the Lucretian model, out of modern science.
The theme has been in my mind for a good many years; and the first
volume, dealing with the "Watchers of the Sky," began to take definite
shape during what was to me an unforgettable experience--the night I
was privileged to spend on a summit of the Sierra Madre Mountains,
when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope.
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