those of the planets to which attention should be at once called: the
planets, being under the control of a central force emanating from
their immediate master, the sun, all move in the same direction and in
orbits concentric about the sun; the stars, on the other hand, move in
every conceivable direction and have no apparent center of motion, for
all efforts to discover such a center have failed. At one time, when
theology had finally to accept the facts of science, a grandiose
conception arose in some pious minds, according to which the Throne of
God was situated at the exact center of His Creation, and, seated
there, He watched the magnificent spectacle of the starry systems
obediently revolving around Him. Astronomical discoveries and
speculations seemed for a time to afford some warrant for this view,
which was, moreover, an acceptable substitute for the abandoned
geocentric theory in minds that could only conceive of God as a
superhuman artificer, constantly admiring his own work. No longer ago
than the middle of the nineteenth century a German astronomer,
Maedler, believed that he had actually found the location of the
center about which the stellar universe revolved. He placed it in the
group of the Pleiades, and upon his authority an extraordinary
imaginative picture was sometimes drawn of the star Alcyone, the
brightest of the Pleiades, as the very seat of the Almighty. This idea
even seemed to gain a kind of traditional support from the mystic
significance, without known historical origin, which has for many
ages, and among widely separated peoples, been attached to the
remarkable group of which Alcyone is the chief. But since Maedler's
time it has been demonstrated that the Pleiades cannot be the center
of revolution of the universe, and, as already remarked, all attempts
to find or fix such a center have proved abortive. Yet so powerful was
the hold that the theory took upon the popular imagination, that even
today astronomers are often asked if Alcyone is not the probable site