in twenty-four hours.

This reminds us of the simplicity of a child we once saw in a
railroad-car, who fancied itself perfectly stationary, and thought the
fences, houses and fields were tearing past it at the rate of thirty
miles an hour;--and poking out its head, to see where on earth they went
to, had its hat--a very nice one with pink ribbons--knocked off and
irrecoverably lost. But Copernicus (who was a son of Daniel Pernicus, of
the firm of Pernicus & Co., wool-dealers, and who was named Co.
Pernicus, out of respect to his father's partners) soon set this matter
to rights, and started the idea of the present Solar System, which,
greatly improved since his day, is occasionally called the Copernican
system. By this system we learn that the Sun is stationed at one _focus_
(not hocus, as it is rendered, without authority by the philosopher
Partington) of an ellipse, where it slowly grinds on for ever about its
own axis, while the planets, turning about their axes, revolve in
elliptical orbits of various dimensions and different planes of
inclination around it.

The demonstration of this system in all its perfection was left to Isaac
Newton, an English Philosopher, who, seeing an apple tumble down from a
tree, was led to think thereon with such gravity, that he finally
discovered the attraction of gravitation, which proved to be the great
law of Nature that keeps everything in its place. Thus we see that as
an apple originally brought sin and ignorance into the world, the same
fruit proved thereafter the cause of vast knowledge and
enlightenment;--and indeed we may doubt whether any other fruit but an
apple, and a sour one at that, would have produced these great
results;--for, had the fallen fruit been a pear, an orange, or a peach,
there is little doubt that Newton would have eaten it up and thought no
more on the subject.

As in this world you will hardly ever find a man so small but that he
has someone else smaller than he, to look up to and revolve around him,
so in the Solar System we find that the majority of the planets have one
or more smaller planets revolving about them. These small bodies are
termed secondaries, moons or satellites--the planets themselves being
called primaries.

We know at present of eighteen primaries, viz.: Mercury, Venus, the
Earth, Mars, Flora, Vesta, Iris, Metis, Hebe, Astrea, Juno, Ceres,
Pallas, Hygeia, Jupiter, Saturn, Herschel, Neptune, and another, yet
unnamed. There are dis