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How far this went back to a belief in the "spirits" of the stars, or whether it had a Semitic origin, we do not know; but it is significant that the cuneiform character which denotes "a god" is a picture of a star, and that the Babylonians were from the first a nation of star-gazers.
When sentiment is exchanged for its corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism, and clear and definite thinking gives place to vague and elusive emotions and fancies, reaction is not only inevitable but wholesome; the instinct for sanity in men will always prevent them from becoming mere dreamers and star-gazers.
For the hares have always been good star-gazers, and the whole race of them, one and all, are not without skill in the mystic sciences, while some are highly charged with knowledge of futurity, and have decided the fate of mighty battles by the mere direction in which they scampered.
In tolerably wide opposition of habits to these tarpaulin men follow the less dashing and showy race sometimes called "star-gazers," sometimes "dictionary-men," who are also occasionally taunted or dignified by their messmates with the title of "philosophers."
When the good King of Judah recovered from his illness by a miracle, the sign of which was, that the sun seemed to retreat in his course, it probably won the attention of the Chaldeans, who were great star-gazers; and Merodach Baladan sent messengers to compliment the king, whose favour with Heaven had thus been shown to all the earth.
Blatchford, if he has any sense of consistency, must, when he has finished his tirade against Christianity, turn his artillery on Greenwich Observatory, and proclaim the Astronomer Royal a scientific quack, on account of the follies of star-gazers in the past. But that parallel is not a true one.
Coming homeward from the distant heavens, the advances of astronomy diminish as we near what may be called the old planets and our pale companion the moon. The existence of a lunar atmosphere and the habitability of Mars are still debated; with, we believe, the odds against both. But the star-gazers make their craft useful in a novel way when it reaches the earth.
When Francis Pfleuger's field had come into being, something had happened to the back doors of Valleyview that caused them to open upon a planet which one of the local star-gazers promptly identified as Sirius XXI. The good folk of Valleyview had no idea of how such a state of affairs could exist, to say nothing of how it could have come about, till one of the scientists whom they asked to join them as a part of the plan which they presently devised to make their forthcoming utopia self-sufficient, came up with a theory that explained everything.
If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances, the most 'dreamy moonshine, as the purely practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits; if 'idle star-gazers' had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and without our astronomy 'our ships, our colonies, our seamen, all which makes modern life modern life could not have existed.
We have heard almost nothing hitherto of such sciences as paleontology, geology, and meteorology, each of which now demands full attention. Meantime, astronomy and what the workers of the elder day called natural philosophy become wonderfully diversified and present numerous phases that would have been startling enough to the star-gazers and philosophers of the earlier epoch.
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