ioo THE WORLD MACHINE 



wheel through the dusky vault ; nightly they watched the 

 planets come and go, the moon show crescent and then wane ; 

 and through the changing seasons saw the heavens change, some 

 groups to drop beneath the horizon's edge for a space, while 

 others came in view. How intimate their feelings must have 

 grown for all these clusters which had to them a name, a myth, 

 and a function in the births and deaths of men. Their legends 

 of the lost Pleiad reveal how closely they observed, and with 

 what poetical felicity their nascent science was robed. It must 

 have been all very real to them, and despite their crude fancies, 

 their groundless imaginings, their mythopoetics, I think in some 

 ways they must have been nearer to the Wonder than the 

 theatre-goers of now, who glance occasionally at the sky to 

 exclaim its beauty, as they hasten from the shut-up playhouse 

 of puppets and tinsel to their suppers or to bed. 



Doubtless the earliest of these figure-groups observed of the 

 ancients was the striking arrangement of seven stars which out- 

 lines so exactly the shape of a dipper and its handle. Known 

 to them was the constellation of the Great Bear ; to our English 

 speech as Charles's Wain, there are probably very few of even 

 the most indifferent eyes who have not noticed its curious shift 

 of position through the night. Seen in the early evening when 

 the stars first emerge, the bowl of the dipper may be upright, 

 and could be filled to the brim. As midnight peals, and the 

 curtain falls and we stumble out into the hubbub of the street 

 with the strains of " Tristan " still throbbing through dazed 

 and drunken senses, the group has been displaced and raised, 

 and the bowl would now spill its contents ; but still the two 

 outermost stars which form the bowl point steadily toward a 

 gleam of light that, while all things else in the heavens change, 

 does not seem to stir. At a yet later hour, when from some 

 function the carriages roll homeward through the silent avenues, 

 the dipper is seen to lie still higher in the sky and has turned 

 its bowl downwards. Yet the two pointer stars still indicate 

 unerringly the centre, round which the whole group seems to 

 revolve. 



Studying other groups in the same region, it came to the 

 early observers that they, too, seemed to describe an orbit 

 round this central star, sweeping through larger and larger 

 circles as they were more and more distant from this unmoving 

 point. It was all as if the heavens formed a vast and measure- 



