DAILY INFLUENCES OF ASTRONOMY — CAMPBELL. 143 



Hope, depends upon the A B C's of astromony. Given fair skies 

 the navigator may locate his ship in the middle of the broad ocean 

 within a mile of its true position. 



4. In America it is the habit to call upon the astronomers to fix the 

 boundary lines between nations by observations of the stars; for 

 example, along the 49th parallel of latitude, from Rainy Lake, Minn., 

 westward almost to the Pacific Ocean. The uncertainty as to where 

 this imaginary line falls upon the ground is nowhere greater than 

 10 or 15 feet, and it has not been found necessary by us, nor by 

 our friends in Canada, to maintain military forts along that line. 



5. The times of high and low tides, vital to mariners in entering 

 many harbors, are determined by or from the work of the astrono- 

 mers. 



We do not dwell upon these responses to the immediate needs of the 

 world, for they are unimportant in comparison with the contributions 

 of the pure knowledge side of astronomy to progressive civilization. 



Let us think of the earth as eternally shrouded in thick clouds, so 

 that terrestrial dwellers could never see the sun, the moon, the comets, 

 the stars, and the nebulae, but not so thick that the sun's energy would 

 fail to penetrate to the soil and grow the crops. Under these conditions 

 we might know the earth's surface strata to the depth of a mile or two. 

 We might know the mountains and the atmosphere to a height of 4 or 

 5 miles. We might acquire a knowledge of the oceans, but we should 

 be creatures of exceedingly narrow limits. Our vision, our life, 

 would be confined to a stratum of earth and air only 4 or 5 miles 

 thick. It would be as if the human race went about its work of 

 raising corn for food and cotton for raiment, always looking down, 

 never looking up, knowing nothing of the universe except an insig- 

 nificantly thin stratum of the little earth. This picture is only a 

 moderately unfair view of life as it existed on our planet 400 years 

 ago, before the days of the telescope, the spectroscope, and the pho- 

 tographic plate, before the days of freedom of speech and thought, 

 which came with the scientific spirit. The earth is for us no longer 

 flat, supported on the back of a great turtle, which rests upon noth- 

 ing. It is round, and every civilized person knows that it is. Exists 

 there an intelligent man in the world whose thoughts, every clay and 

 many times a clay, are not unconsciously adapted to this fact ? This 

 knowledge is a chief inheritance of the new generations. It is funda- 

 mental in our civilization. People know that the sun will rise in the 

 morning and set in the evening, and why. A round earth, rotating 

 upon its axis in a dependable way and revolving around the sun in 

 exact obedience to law, are truths incomparably more sublime than 

 the fiction of the flat earth which was pictured hazily in men's minds 

 during pre-Copernican clays. Who can estimate the value of this 



