s cost. He does not value its results merely
as a means of crossing the ocean or mapping the country, for he feels
that man does not live by bread alone. If it is not more than bread to
know the place we occupy in the universe, it is certainly something
which we should place not far behind the means of subsistence. That we
now look upon a comet as something very interesting, of which the sight
affords us a pleasure unmixed with fear of war, pestilence, or other
calamity, and of which we therefore wish the return, is a gain we
cannot measure by money. In all ages astronomy has been an index to the
civilization of the people who cultivated it. It has been crude or
exact, enlightened or mingled with superstition, according to the
current mode of thought. When once men understand the relation of the
planet on which they dwell to the universe at large, superstition is
doomed to speedy extinction. This alone is an object worth more than
money.

Astronomy may fairly claim to be that science which transcends all
others in its demands upon the practical application of our reasoning
powers. Look at the stars that stud the heavens on a clear evening.
What more hopeless problem to one confined to earth than that of
determining their varying distances, their motions, and their physical
constitution? Everything on earth we can handle and investigate. But
how investigate that which is ever beyond our reach, on which we can
never make an experiment? On certain occasions we see the moon pass in
front of the sun and hide it from our eyes. To an observer a few miles
away the sun was not entirely hidden, for the shadow of the moon in a
total eclipse is rarely one hundred miles wide. On another continent no
eclipse at all may have been visible. Who shall take a map of the world
and mark upon it the line on which the moon's shadow will travel during
some eclipse a hundred years hence? Who shall map out the orbits of the
heavenly bodies as they are going to appear in a hundred thousand
years? How shall we ever know of what chemical elements the sun and the
stars are made? All this has been done, but not by the intellect of any
one man. The road to the stars has been opened only by the efforts of
many generations of mathematicians and observers, each of whom began
where his predecessor had left off.

We have reached a stage where we know much of the heavenly bodies. We
have mapped out our solar system with great precision. But how with
that