to see so many millions of radiant
lights, and to observe their courses and revolutions, even
without any respect to the common good of the
Universe.--SENECA.

CHAPTER X

THE STARRY HEAVENS

Many years ago I paid a visit to Naples, and ascended Vesuvius to see
the sun rise from the top of the mountain. We went up to the Observatory
in the evening and spent the night outside. The sky was clear; at our
feet was the sea, and round the bay the lights of Naples formed a lovely
semicircle. Far more beautiful, however, were the moon and the stars
overhead; the moon throwing a silver path over the water, and the stars
shining in that clear atmosphere with a brilliance which I shall never
forget.

For ages and ages past men have admired the same glorious spectacle, and
yet neither the imagination of Man nor the genius of Poetry had risen to
the truer and grander conceptions of the Heavens for which we are
indebted to astronomical Science. The mechanical contrivances by which
it was attempted to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies were
clumsy and prosaic when compared with the great discovery of Newton.
Ruskin is unjust I think when he says "Science teaches us that the
clouds are a sleety mist; Art, that they are a golden throne." I should
be the last to disparage the debt we owe to Art, but for our knowledge,
and even more, for our appreciation, feeble as even yet it is, of the
overwhelming grandeur of the Heavens, we are mainly indebted to Science.

There is scarcely a form which the fancy of Man has not sometimes
detected in the clouds,--chains of mountains, splendid cities, storms at
sea, flights of birds, groups of animals, monsters of all kinds,--and
our superstitious ancestors often terrified themselves by fantastic
visions of arms and warriors and battles which they regarded as portents
of coming calamities. There is hardly a day on which Clouds do not
delight and surprise us by their forms and colours. They belong,
however, to our Earth, and I must now pass on to the heavenly bodies.

[Illustration: THE MOON.

_To face page 377._]

THE MOON

The Moon is the nearest, and being the nearest, appears to us, with the
single exception of the Sun, the largest, although it is in reality one
of the smallest, of the heavenly bodies. Just as the Earth goes round
the Sun, and the period of revolution constitutes a year, so the Moon
goes round the Earth approximately in a period of one m