THE TRUE GRANDEUR OF THE SUN 235 



To still greater purpose, it was when the earth and its com- 

 panion "wanderers" could be pictured in such guise; when the 

 sun could be thought of as a body so vast that its monstrous 

 bulk would envelop a space near twice that occupied by the 

 earth and its circling satellite that the moon pursues its 

 orbital way about the earth within a space of half the shell of 

 the sun it was this that could build up the idea of the sun as 

 the dominant fact, the ruling force, the monarch of our world. 

 It was this which could bring conceptions of its power, and then 

 of a power which holds the planets as dogs within a leash. 



But before this latter conception could take hold, men had 

 to gain more definite conceptions of power that is to say, of 

 force. And this could, in its turn, arise only from the develop- 

 ment of machines, and out of these, a mechanical science. 



This development was even then in full swing. 



