"Through faith we understand that the worlds [plural] were framed
by the word of God, so that things which were seen were not made
of things which do appear."--_Heb._ xi. 3.
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"O rich and various man! Thou palace of sight and sound, carrying
in thy senses the morning, and the night, and the unfathomable
galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart
the power of love, and the realms of right and wrong. An individual
man is a fruit which it costs all the foregoing ages to form and
ripen. He is strong, not to do but to live; not in his arms, but
in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact."--EMERSON.
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VII.
_THE PLANETS AS INDIVIDUALS._
How many bodies there may be revolving about the sun we have no
means to determine or arithmetic to express. When the new star
of the American Republic appeared, there were but six planets
discovered. Since then three regions of the solar system have been
explored with wonderful success. The outlying realms beyond Saturn
yielded the planet Uranus in 1781, and Neptune in 1846. The middle
region between Jupiter and Mars yielded the little planetoid Ceres
in 1801, Pallas in 1802, and one hundred and ninety others since.
The inner region between Mercury and the sun is of necessity full
of small meteoric bodies; the question is, are there any bodies
large enough to be seen?
The same great genius of Leverrier that gave us Neptune from the
observed perturbations of Uranus, pointed out perturbations in
Mercury that necessitated either a planet or a group of planetoids
between Mercury and the sun. Theoretical astronomers, aided by the
fact that no planet had certainly been seen, and that all asserted
discoveries of one had been by inexperienced observers, inclined
to the belief in a group, or that the disturbance was caused by
the matter reflecting the zodiacal light.
When the total eclipse of the sun occurred in 1878, [Page 138]
astronomers were determined that the question of the existence of an
intra-mercurial planet should be settled. Maps of all the stars in
the region of the sun were carefully studied, sections of the sky
about the sun were assigned to different observers, who should
attend to nothing but to look for a possible planet. It is now
conceded that Professor Watson, of Ann Arbor, actually saw the
sought-for body.