erse beyond, but for the
great mass of men it was quite impossible. To them the modern idea of
a universe consisting of hundreds of millions of bodies, each weighing
billions of tons, strewn over billions of miles of space, would have
seemed the dream of a child or a savage. Material bodies were "heavy,"
and would "fall down" if they were not supported. The universe, they
said, was a sensible scientific structure; things were supported in
their respective places. A great dome, of some unknown but compact
material, spanned the earth, and sustained the heavenly bodies. It might
rest on the distant mountains, or be borne on the shoulders of an Atlas;
or the whole cosmic scheme might be laid on the back of a gigantic
elephant, and--if you pressed--the elephant might stand on the hard
shell of a tortoise. But you were not encouraged to press.

The idea of the vault had come from Babylon, the first home of science.
No furnaces thickened that clear atmosphere, and the heavy-robed priests
at the summit of each of the seven-staged temples were astronomers.
Night by night for thousands of years they watched the stars and
planets tracing their undeviating paths across the sky. To explain their
movements the priest-astronomers invented the solid firmament. Beyond
the known land, encircling it, was the sea, and beyond the sea was a
range of high mountains, forming another girdle round the earth. On
these mountains the dome of the heavens rested, much as the dome of
St. Paul's rests on its lofty masonry. The sun travelled across its
under-surface by day, and went back to the east during the night through
a tunnel in the lower portion of the vault. To the common folk the
priests explained that this framework of the world was the body of an
ancient and disreputable goddess. The god of light had slit her in two,
"as you do a dried fish," they said, and made the plain of the earth
with one half and the blue arch of the heavens with the other.

So Chaldaea lived out its 5000 years without discovering the universe.
Egypt adopted the idea from more scientific Babylon. Amongst the
fragments of its civilisation we find representations of the firmament
as a goddess, arching over the earth on her hands and feet, condemned to
that eternal posture by some victorious god. The idea spread amongst the
smaller nations which were lit by the civilisation of Babylon and Egypt.
Some blended it with coarse old legends; some, like the Persians and
Hebrews