him?" The Hebrew psalmist feels the insignificance of man compared with the infinitude of the heavens. Victor Hugo expresses the opposite thoug

patriarch. Thousands of years before the birth of Christ the priests of Chaldea, from the tops of their flat-roofed temples, studied the stars and laid the foundations of the science o

od and ill the lives of men. There were supposed to be stars of goo

r Brutus, is no

es, that we ar

At the center of our system is the sun, a huge ball of fiery matter 93,000,000 miles from the earth, and as large as 330,000 worlds like ours. Circling around the sun like maddened horses around a race course are eight planets. These planets, with the sun and some comets, constitute our solar system; our system, f

n size Distance from sun in millions of miles Time required for

8 5,000,000

425,000 66

332,260 92

3,093,500 1

39 1,048 483

6 3,502 886

22,600 1,783

5 19,400 2,79

ou had your home out on the border land of the solar system, on the planet Neptune, you would have a birthday once in about 165 years, as we count time on the earth. It will be observed that the closer the planet is to the sun, the faster it travels in its orbit. This fact i

hool in Lincolnshire, and later entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he was graduated in 1665. Early in life he displayed a great liking for mathematics. Within

ple to fall from a tree holds the heavenly bodies in their places. Further investigation brought him to the unfolding of this general law of gravitation: "Every body in nature attracts every other body with a force directly as its mass, and inversely as the square of its distance." This law is the greatest law of nature. It is the ce

e history of the world. He died at Kensington, England, on March 20, 1727, an

saac

ng French astronomer, wrote in substance to an assistant in the observatory at Berlin: "Direct your telescope to a point on the ecliptic in the constellation of Aquarius in longitude 326°, and you will find within a degree of that place a new planet, looking like a star of the ninth magnitude, and having a perceptible disk." Leverrier did not know of the existence of such a planet. He calculated its existence, location, and mass from the fact that some such body must be there, to account for the disturbance cause

it around the sun more sluggishly than any other planet. Life such as we know it on the earth could not exist on Neptune; it would be too cold. The light and heat from the sun on Neptune are only one nine hundredth part of what we get on the earth. But even so, the sun

was considered the center of the universe, and around it the other planets and the sun were believed to revolve. A passage in the Bible in which Joshua commanded the sun to stand still indicates that the old Hebrews believed the sun cir

oom, through which he might observe the stars. Copernicus did not believe in the theory of Ptolemy that the earth was the center of the universe, but held that the solar system had for its center the su

1543, he lay dying in Frauenburg. A few hours before his death, when reason, memory, and life were slipping away from him, the first printed copy of his book was borne to Frauenburg an

ved around the sun in circular orbits, but Kepler discovered that their paths are ellipses. He also found that the nearer the planets are to the sun the faster they travel. Kepler's discoveries w

aning "to see." The telescope, therefore, is an instrument for seeing objects that are far off. It is a long tube With lenses so arranged as to make objects appear much larger than they would to the naked eye. The telescope was invented by a Dutch optician named Hans Lippershey about three hundred years ago. The Italian scientis

li

rkes telescope, belonging to the University of Chicago and located on the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

ions between different substances and the light which they emit. By analyzing the light from the heavenly bodies with the aid of the spectroscope, and comparing this result with

n the other hand, life such as we know it could not exist on some of the other planets. Mercury would be too hot; Neptune too cold. Climatic conditions on Mars are most nearly like those of the earth. Within recent years the telescope has revealed on the surface of Mars a number of peculiar,