DAILY INFLUENCES OF ASTRONOMY CAMPBELL. 151 



elsewhere in the stellar system; and its future journeyings will lead 

 to quite other points of observation. 



The question of greatest interest to present-day astronomers is 

 that of stellar systems other than our own. The chances seem strong 

 that the hundreds of thousands of spiral nebulse known to exist, 

 in very distant space are other and independent systems of stars, 

 many of them perhaps containing as many stars as our stellar 

 system. In other words, our stellar system may be but one of 

 hundreds of thousands of isolated stellar systems distributed through 

 endless space. This is not an established fact, but the evidence 

 seems to run in its favor. 



I have referred to some of the problems and results of astronomi- 

 cal science. The list of interesting items is a long one, but available 

 time has its limits. In brief, it is the astronomer's duty to discover 

 the truth about his surroundings in space, and make it a part of 

 the knowledge of his day and generation. The ultimate and real 

 value of his work lies in its influence upon the lives of the people 

 of the world, in the change for the better which it induces in their 

 modes of thought, and in the impulse which it gives to an advancing 

 civilization. 



Would that the attractions of the sky to the average man were 

 more potent. It is a curious comment upon the attributes of city 

 life that hundreds of thousands of people, especially children, in 

 London and Paris, in the darkness which gave them semiconceal- 

 ment from the enemy's destructive airships, should have obtained 

 their first real vision of the starry heavens. What must have been 

 their sensations ? On the other hand, those who can view its beauties 

 and wonders are prone to neglect it; to look down instead of up. 

 Emerson has said somewhere in his immortal essays that if our 

 sky should be clear of clouds but one night in a century, the people 

 of this globe would look forward to the rare event, and not only 

 prepare to behold its beauties themselves, but make sure that their 

 friends far and wide were likewise minded. How the beauties of 

 the night sky would surpass the expectations of the most lively 

 imagination! The wondrous vision would be the prevailing sub- 

 ject of conversation for years and years, and the repetition of the 

 vision, 100 years later, would need no advertising. 



Our knowledge of the heavens is in its infancy. We have 

 but made a start upon the discovery of the truth about the 

 stars, and the results of astronomical research are not so widely 

 known amongst the people as they should be. This splendid 

 institution, The Warner & Swasey Observatory, presented 

 by men who were masters in telescope and observatory de- 

 sign and construction, by men who have thought much of relative 



