CHAPTER XXVIII 



OUR PLACE IN SPACE: THE PLURALITY OF 

 WORLDS 



BLOWN about for days upon the tempest waters of the ocean, 

 the first instinct of the mariner upon gaining some haven is to 

 know, if he may, whither he has been tossed by the sport of 

 the elements. If it be an unknown, uninhabited land, he will 

 endeavour by the aid of the stars to fix its point upon the map. 

 If it have there no place and its contours reach beyond the eye, 

 his unconquerable ambition will be to know what is its extent 

 what is its shape. * 



The position of man, tossed by the sport of chance upon 

 our little earth, is much the same. From the earliest period 

 he has sought for a long time vainly to gain some clue as 

 to his latitude and longitude in space ; let us say, also, the 

 extent of space itself. The ideas of the ancients could necessarily 

 have been but of the crudest. Their whole knowledge of the 

 earth, as we have seen, extended not much beyond the confines 

 of a territory about the length and breadth of the United 

 States. 



Within four hundred years we know how vastly this has 

 changed, but the extent of the change is less easy to realise. 

 Save for a few who interest themselves with the problems and 

 the reports of the astronomers, not many, perhaps, have any 

 vivid presentation of the reality. Perhaps we may reach this by 

 a process of summation. Starting from familiar facts, from 

 familiar distances, we may rise step by step, perhaps, to some 

 vague conception of the cosmos in which we move. 



The longest voyage ever taken by the ancients was probably 

 the circumnavigation of Africa, five or six hundred years before 

 our era. It was rarely repeated. In general, the extreme 

 extent of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and along the 

 western coast as far as Ultima Thule, was the utmost reach 



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