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The way in which the planetary orbits are tilted is slight in comparison with that of the orbits of comets, for these are at all sorts of angles some turned almost sideways, and others slanting, and all of them are ellipses long drawn out and much more irregular than the planetary orbits; but erratic as they are, in every case a line drawn through the sun and extended both ways would touch each side of the orbits.
Then they went more slowly, and Achilles's long finger traced the heavens for her the Greek gods up there in their swinging orbits... the warm, August night of the world. Betty Harris had never known the stars like this. Safe from her window, she had seen them twinkle out.
We say still that the orbits of the planets are ellipses, because, for all ordinary purposes, that is a sufficiently near approximation to the truth; but, as a matter of fact, the centre of gravity of a planet describes neither an ellipse or any other simple curve, but an immensely complicated undulating line.
My first thought was that he must be frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken.
The uninstructed mind could not readily admit the idea that the great masses of the planets were suspended in empty space and retained in their orbits by an invisible influence residing in the sun; and even those philosophers who had been accustomed to the rigor of true scientific research, and who possessed sufficient mathematical skill for the examination of the Newtonian doctrines, viewed them at first as reviving the occult qualities of the ancient physics, and resisted their introduction with a pertinacity which it is not easy to explain.
Men have indeed been brought into being on this condition, that they should guard the globe which you see in the midst of this temple, which is called the earth; and a soul has been given to them from those eternal fires which you call constellations and stars, which, globed and round, animated with god- derived minds, complete their courses and move through their orbits with amazing speed.
It might be supposed that in this case the dark body was too far advanced in cooling to suffer the same fate from the tidal pull of its victim. But a close approach of that kind would be expected to result in the formation of a binary system, with orbits of great eccentricity, perhaps, and after the lapse of a certain time the outburst should be renewed by another approximation of the two bodies.
He had long followed the glittering yet fleeting traces left by the meteors through the blue depths of space; he had tracked the mystic and incalculable orbits of the comets as they flash through their wandering paths, solitary and incomprehensible, everywhere dreaded for their ominous splendor, yet inoffensive and harmless.
To this it was at first replied that the perturbations of the asteroidal orbits, by the attractions of the major planets, would soon displace them in such a manner that they would cease to intersect. One of the first investigations undertaken by the late Prof.
Those queer legends of his birth, his affinity for fixed luminaries and motions, and his conscious knowledge that he stood in some way related to spheres and orbits, and the laws of revolution and period, had never disturbed his mind in its calculations. But if he did stand exceptional in these respects to his fellow-men, might another and a beloved one comprehend what he himself did not?
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