the thoughtless man, the stars seem to have very little relation
to his daily life; they might be forever hid from view without his
being the worse for it. He wonders what object men can have in
devoting themselves to the study of the motions or phenomena of
the heavens. But the more he looks into the subject, and the wider
the range which his studies include, the more he will be impressed
with the great practical usefulness of the science of the heavens.
And yet I think it would be a serious error to say that the
world's greatest debt to astronomy was owing to its usefulness in
surveying, navigation, and chronology. The more enlightened a man
is, the more he will feel that what makes his mind what it is, and
gives him the ideas of himself and creation which he possesses, is
more important than that which gains him wealth. 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.