pectroscopic evidence that the
Pole Star is triple. In pi' we see a wide double, magnitudes six and
seven, distance 30", p. 83 deg..

This completes our survey of the starry heavens.

CHAPTER VIII

SCENES ON THE PLANETS

"These starry globes far surpassed the earth in grandeur, and the
latter looked so diminutive that our empire, which appeared only as
a point on its surface, awoke my pity."--CICERO, THE DREAM OF
SCIPIO.

Although amateurs have played a conspicuous part in telescopic discovery
among the heavenly bodies, yet every owner of a small telescope should
not expect to attach his name to a star. But he certainly can do
something perhaps more useful to himself and his friends; he can follow
the discoveries that others, with better appliances and opportunities,
have made, and can thus impart to those discoveries that sense of
reality which only comes from seeing things with one's own eyes. There
are hundreds of things continually referred to in books and writings on
astronomy which have but a misty and uncertain significance for the mere
reader, but which he can easily verify for himself with the aid of a
telescope of four or five inches aperture, and which, when actually
confronted by the senses, assume a meaning, a beauty, and an importance
that would otherwise entirely have escaped him. Henceforth every
allusion to the objects he has seen is eloquent with intelligence and
suggestion.

Take, for instance, the planets that have been the subject of so many
observations and speculations of late years--Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Venus. For the ordinary reader much that is said about them makes very
little impression upon his mind, and is almost unintelligible. He reads
of the "snow patches" on Mars, but unless he has actually seen the
whitened poles of that planet he can form no clear image in his mind of
what is meant. So the "belts of Jupiter" is a confusing and misleading
phrase for almost everybody except the astronomer, and the rings of
Saturn are beyond comprehension unless they have actually been seen.

It is true that pictures and photographs partially supply the place of
observation, but by no means so successfully as many imagine. The most
realistic drawings and the sharpest photographs in astronomy are those
of the moon, yet I think nobody would maintain that any picture in
existence is capable of imparting a really satisfactory visual
impression of the appearance of the lun