CHAPTER VIII 



THE TURNING OF THE EARTH: THE FIXITY 

 OF THE SKY 



WE seem to go through the world nowadays with eyes upon the 

 ground. We are no longer interested in the pageant of the 

 sky. The shows of earth enchain us. City streets are full of 

 a restless life, and when, grown weary of the stir and din, we 

 take flight to the country, it is the green of the fields, the 

 splendour of the sun, we see. The vivid lighting of the cities 

 hides the stars, and on the lonely hill-tops the patient shepherds 

 no longer guard the night. 



In the olden days, on Mesopotamian plains, or along the 

 untroubled current of the Nile, life fared strangely otherwise. 

 There were cities, true ; and the days of the eager and restless 

 Athenians, the gay and sceptical Alexandrians, the future St. 

 Augustine in the arms of the frail beauties of Carthage, differed 

 little, doubtless, from our own. But the nights were warm ; in 

 those cloudless lands the stars blaze and burn like carbuncles, 

 and are full of that mystic fascination from which astrology 

 was born. To the watchers of the flocks they were a theatre, 

 with an ever shifting scene and a nightly change of bill. 



How intently they must have studied the motley crowd of 

 lights that filled the stage, for presently groups of stars took 

 on names and shapes ; there were Great Bears and Little, 

 Fishes and Swans, Centaurs and Dragons and Scorpions, Archers 

 and Charioteers. Hercules, turned a god, showed his form 

 nightly to mortals, and through the depths of the blue, Bootes 

 drove with his dog. The intense and realistic imagination 

 which we observe in children's play, and which the greater 

 poets, discoverers, and men of science never lose, finds its 

 counterpart in the fancies of those days, when the thoughtfullest 

 of men looked up at the spectacle of the world with the eyes 

 of a child. 



Nightly they saw the constellations, as they named them, 



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