United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Those only are beautiful which, like the planets, have a steady, lambent light; are luminous, but not sparkling. Such eyes the Greek poets give to the Immortals. But I forget myself. The lady's figure was striking. Every step, every attitude was graceful, and yet lofty, as if inspired by the soul within.
He had a tiara on, and golden crescents and rosettes blazed all over him, and he wore a mystic, sacred ornament on his chest, round and covered all over with queer emblems. He rode past the temple, where the walls were painted in different colors, one for each of the planets and such, because the Babylonish people worshipped those orange for Jupiter, and blue for Mercury, and silver for the moon.
But if the earth be only one of the planets revolving round the sun, an insignificant body in the solar system, she will disappear entirely in the immensity of the heavens, in which this system, vast as it may appear to us, is nothing but an insensible point. The triumphant establishment of the Copernican doctrine dates from the invention of the telescope.
Thus he remarks, that the primary planets all move nearly in one plane, and "show a progressive increase of bulk and diminution of density, from the one nearest to the sun to that which is most distant." But he passes over other characteristics of these bodies, equally important, which are quite irregular, and cannot be traced to the operation of one law.
The near agreement of this row of results with the row containing the actual relative distances of the planets from the sun may well astonish, not only the astronomer, but the common reader. Those distances making 10 to represent the distance of the earth are as follows: Mercury, 3.9; Venus, 7.2; Earth, 10; Mars, 15.2; Asteroids, 27.4; Jupiter, 52; Saturn, 95.4; Uranus, 192; Neptune, 300.
Two of these works deal in some detail with the world of the future as he thought it might be prophetic fiction, if you will; another two give us a picture of life on neighboring planets; and the final couple, although they maintain a terrestrial locale, show as wide a scope of creative invention. In only one of these does astronomy fail to play at least a supporting role.
In such a nebular mass, cooling by radiation is a necessary incident, and condensation and rotation the inevitable results. There must be a separation of rings all lying in one plane, a generation of planets and satellites all rotating alike, a central sun and engirdling globes. From a chaotic mass, through the operation of natural laws, an organized system has been produced.
Suddenly Pentaur raised his head, lifted his hands to heaven, and cried: "O Thou! the One! though stars may fall from the heavens in summer nights, still Thy eternal and immutable laws guide the never-resting planets in their paths.
If the tale goes on to change clouds or planets into living creatures, to invest them with fair forms and inflame them with mighty passions, we can only understand the story of the human-hearted things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in the perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, by an effort of imagination, with the strange people who had other loves than those of wealth, and other interests than those of commerce.
For having in the natural history of the earth seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions.
Word Of The Day