I therefore hold
that the world's greatest debt to astronomy is that it has taught
us what a great thing creation is, and what an insignificant part
of the Creator's work is this earth on which we dwell, and
everything that is upon it. That space is infinite, that wherever
we go there is a farther still beyond it, must have been accepted
as a fact by all men who have thought of the subject since men
began to think at all. But it is very curious how hard even the
astronomers found it to believe that creation is as large as we
now know it to be. The Greeks had their gods on or not very far
above Olympus, which was a sort of footstool to the heavens.
Sometimes they tried to guess how far it probably was from the
vault of heaven to the earth, and they had a myth as to the time
it took Vulcan to fall. Ptolemy knew that the moon was about
thirty diameters of the earth distant from us, and he knew that
the sun was many times farther than the moon; he thought it about
twenty times as far, but could not be sure. We know that it is
nearly four hundred times as far.
When Copernicus propounded the theory that the earth moved around
the sun, and not the sun around the earth, he was able to fix the
relative distances of the several planets, and thus make a map of
the solar system.
Pages:
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302