The term Astronomy is derived from two Latin words,--_Astra_, a star,
and _onomy_, a science; and literally means the science of the stars.
"It is a science," to quote our friend Dick (who was no relation at all
of Big Dick, though the latter occasionally caused individuals to see
stars), "which has, in all ages, engaged the attention of the poet, the
philosopher, and the divine, and been the subject of their study and
admiration."
By the wondrous discoveries of the improved telescopes of modern times,
we ascertain that upward of several hundred millions of stars exist,
that are invisible to the naked eye--the nearest of which is millions of
millions of miles from the Earth; and as we have every reason to suppose
that every one of this inconceivable number of worlds is peopled like
our own, a consideration of this fact--and that we are undoubtedly as
superior to these beings as we are to the rest of mankind--is calculated
to fill the mind of the American with a due sense of his own importance
in the scale of animated creation.
It is supposed that each of the stars we see in the Heavens in a
cloudless night is a sun shining upon its own curvilinear, with light of
its own manufacture; and as it would be absurd to suppose its light and
heat were made to be diffused for nothing, it is presumed farther, that
each sun, like an old hen, is provided with a parcel of little chickens,
in the way of planets, which, shining but feebly by its reflected light,
are to us invisible. To this opinion we are led, also, by reasoning from
analogy, on considering our own Solar System.
THE SOLAR SYSTEM is so called, not because we believe it to be the sole
system of the kind in existence, but from its principal body, the Sun,
the Latin name of which is _Sol_. (Thus we read of Sol Smith, literally
meaning the _son_ of Old Smith.) On a close examination of the Heavens
we perceive numerous brilliant stars which shine with a steady light
(differing from those which surround them, which are always twinkling
like a dewdrop on a cucumber-vine), and which, moreover, do not preserve
constantly the same relative distance from the stars near which they are
first discovered. These are the planets of the SOLAR SYSTEM, which have
no light of their own--of which the Earth, on which we reside, is
one--which shine by light reflected from the Sun--and which regularly
move around that body at different intervals of time and through
different ranges in space. Up to the time of a gentleman named
Copernicus, who flourished about the middle of the Fifteenth Century, it
was supposed by our stupid ancestors that the Earth was the center of
all creation, being a large, flat body resting on a rock which rested on
another rock, and so on "all the way down"; and that the Sun, planets
and immovable stars all revolved about it once in twenty-four hours.
This reminds us of the simplicity of a child we once saw in a
railroad-car, who fancied itself perfectly stationary, and thought the
fences, houses and fields were tearing past it at the rate of thirty
miles an hour;--and poking out its head, to see where on earth they went
to, had its hat--a very nice one with pink ribbons--knocked off and
irrecoverably lost. But Copernicus (who was a son of Daniel Pernicus, of
the firm of Pernicus & Co., wool-dealers, and who was named Co.
Pernicus, out of respect to his father's partners) soon set this matter
to rights, and started the idea of the present Solar System, which,
greatly improved since his day, is occasionally called the Copernican
system. By this system we learn that the Sun is stationed at one _focus_
(not hocus, as it is rendered, without authority by the philosopher
Partington) of an ellipse, where it slowly grinds on for ever about its
own axis, while the planets, turning about their axes, revolve in
elliptical orbits of various dimensions and different planes of
inclination around it.
The demonstration of this system in all its perfection was left to Isaac
Newton, an English Philosopher, who, seeing an apple tumble down from a
tree, was led to think thereon with such gravity, that he finally
discovered the attraction of gravitation, which proved to be the great
law of Nature that keeps everything in its place. Thus we see that as
an apple originally brought sin and ignorance into the world, the same
fruit proved thereafter the cause of vast knowledge and
enlightenment;--and indeed we may doubt whether any other fruit but an
apple, and a sour one at that, would have produced these great
results;--for, had the fallen fruit been a pear, an orange, or a peach,
there is little doubt that Newton would have eaten it up and thought no
more on the subject.
As in this world you will hardly ever find a man so small but that he
has someone else smaller than he, to look up to and revolve around him,
so in the Solar System we find that the majority of the planets have one
or more smaller planets revolving about them. These small bodies are
termed secondaries, moons or satellites--the planets themselves being
called primaries.
We know at present of eighteen primaries, viz.: Mercury, Venus, the
Earth, Mars, Flora, Vesta, Iris, Metis, Hebe, Astrea, Juno, Ceres,
Pallas, Hygeia, Jupiter, Saturn, Herschel, Neptune, and another, yet
unnamed. There are distributed among these, nineteen secondaries, all of
which, except our Moon, are invisible to the naked eye.
We shall now proceed to consider, separately, the different bodies
composing the Solar System, and to make known what little information,
comparatively speaking, science has collected regarding them. And, first
in order, as in place, we come to