188 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



No eye can fail to note her, and as the nearest and most beautiful of 

 the Earth's sisters it would seem that everybody should be as famil- 

 iar with her appearance as with the face of a friend. But the popular 

 ignorance of Venus, and the other members of the planetary family 

 to which our mother, the Earth, belongs, is only an index of the denser 

 ignorance concerning the stars the brothers of our great father, the 

 Sun. I believe this ignorance is largely due to mere indifference, 

 which, in its turn, arises from a false and pedantic method of present- 

 ing astronomy as a jumble of mathematical formula 1 , and a humble 

 handmaiden of the art of navigation. Some teachers of astronomy 

 are so fearful that their imagination may run away with them in the 

 boundless fields of the universe, that they hobble it with a chain of 

 ephemerides, break its jaw with a logarithmic bit, and end by earning 

 what they, perhaps unconsciously, seek, a niche in the temple of Dry- 

 as-dust. Of course, the public looks upon such things with indiffer- 

 ence. Understand, I do not mean to cast doubt upon the scientific 

 value of technical work in astronomy. The science could not exist 

 without it. And no reproach is intended to those who have made the 

 spectroscope reveal the composition of the sun and stars, and who are 

 now making photography picture the heavens as they are, and even re- 

 veal phenomena which lie beyond the range of human vision. These 

 are the men who have taken astronomy out of its swaddling-clothes, 

 and set it on its feet as a progressive science. But when one sees the 

 depressing and repellent effect that has evidently been produced upon 

 the popular mind by the ordinary methods of presenting astronomy, 

 one can not resist the temptation to utter a vigorous protest, and to 

 declare that this glorious science is not the grinning mathematical 

 skeleton that it has been represented to be. 



Whoever will use an opera-glass, or even his naked eyes, with in- 

 telligence, in surveying the heavens, will quickly convince himself that 

 all of astronomy is not embraced in the "Nautical Almanac." 



In the April number of "The Popular Science Monthly " I pointed 

 out some of the most interesting objects to be seen among the stars 

 that adorn the sky in spring. The annual revolution of the heavens 

 has now carried those stars that in April shone in the western sky be- 

 low the horizon, while the constellations that were then in the east have 

 now climbed to the zenith, or passed over to the west, and a fresh set 

 of stars has taken their place in the east. In the present article we 

 shall deal with what may be called the stars of summer; and, in order 

 to furnish occupation for the observer with an opera-glass throughout 

 the summer months, I have endeavored to so choose the constellations 

 in which our explorations will be made, that some of them shall be 

 favorably situated in each of the months of June, July, and August. 

 The circular map represents the heavens at midnight on the 1st of 

 June ; at eleven o'clock, on the 15th of June ; at ten o'clock, on the 

 1st of July ; at nine o'clock, on the 15th of July ; and at eight o'clock, 



