comstock OUR OWN SUN AND HIS OWN FAMILY 315 



Far beyond Saturn is a very far away world, Uranus which is 

 a huge globe having a diameter of 31,900 miles. It is so far away 

 from the sun that it circles around it once in about 84 years. A 

 strange thing about this far-away world is that it rotates backward 

 on its axis, that is, from east to west, but it revolves around the 

 sun in the regular approved way of the planet family. It is probably 

 in a gaseous state and very hot. It has four moons none of which 

 is more than 1,000 miles thick and they are a lawless lot from a 

 respectable moon standpoint, for they move around Uranus cross- 

 wise and at right angles to his orbit, and move backwards at that, 

 but what hustling months they make ! There is nothing slow about 

 the moons of Uranus even if they are small and do revolve back- 

 ward and at right-angles to the paths they should follow. The 

 moon with the longest record makes its circle in less than nine days, 

 and the liveliest one of the four whirls about it in two and one-half 

 days. As we read with wonder about these moons of Uranus, we 

 wonder if perchance Saturn's Phoebe may not have gotten her 

 erratic ways by associating with them. Probably the astronomers 

 would smile at this flight of imagination. 



Neptune is the outermost planet of our sun's family, and is so 

 far away that it came near never being discovered by a telescope. 

 It had never been identified as a planet until after the mathema- 

 ticians became suspicious after they discovered certain irregular- 

 ities in Uranus' journey around the sun. It so happened that two 

 very clever mathematicians worked out independently a theory 

 to account for this irregularity which involved a planet circling 

 far beyond which might thus effect the actions of Uranus, and 

 soon after this in 1840 Neptune was discovered through a telescope 

 in just about the position that the mathematicians had predicted. 

 It is so far away that it is only as bright as a star of the ninth 

 magnitude. It is also a gaseous planet and has a diameter of 35,000 

 miles, and it is probably very hot. It is so far away from our sun, 

 that its year is nearly 165 of our years long. If they elect Presidents 

 for four years on Neptune, the term would be 660 years. Neptune 

 is supposed to rotate on its axis backwards from east to west. It 

 has one moon which moves around it backwards as compared to 

 the direction in which most moons move around their primaries. 



When we think of the millions of miles covered by our sun and 

 its family of worlds, we have a feeling that they must occupy a 

 very large protion of the universe, but they really occupy only a 



