Publisher's Synopsis
Signs, Signals, Symbols seldom seen, science says sing silent songs of the glory of the maker of five hundred million suns. I. The Wonders of The Heavens. II. The Wonders of The Solar System. 111. The Wonders of 'l'he Earth. IV. The Wonders of Life. V. The. Wonders of Human Life. Go out at night, when the stars shine bright, and look up at the heavens. A ring of light at a vast height sweeps round amid the stars. A great half-circle it seems -in our northern latitude, its two ends lost below the horizon. Go south, below the equator, and you find it forms a mighty white cloudy ribbon, running round the whole heavens. It inclines at an angle of 63 degrees to the equinoctial, that imaginary plane where the sun is when days and nights are equal. From far-off days, when our race was young, men asked: What is it? Because of its whiteness, the Greeks called it the Galaxy, from gala, "milk," and we the Milky Way. Sweeping round the whole firmament, as a mighty ring, looking like a bright, 'long, white expanse with irregular borders, nowhere broken, it ever excited curiosity, and claimed the study of the world's greatest minds. All was guesswork till the telescope was invented. the two Herschels, Sir William and Sir John, father and son, using the most powerful instruments known in their -days, spent almost 'their whole lives in its study. The greatest astronomers of all ages, in every civilized country, tried to penetrate its mysteries, and in few words we will lay before the reader the sum total of their labors. How can we make the reader grasp the Wonders our instruments reveal, when so many learned men have spent their whole lives studying the heavens how, will we condense their discoveries into a few pages?
