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ASTRONOMY AS A SCIENCE. THE SUN. 



WHAT I may write under this title will be but a partial 

 glance at that progress in Astronomy, which more than 

 ever marks this science as one of the most wonderful, 

 but not duly appreciated, attainments of man. 



I know no case in which the marvellous is so lost 

 in the familiar as the indifference with which men 

 gaze on the stars of heaven on a night of clear sky. 

 Were it one star or planet only, or the multitude seen 

 for the first time, the sight would be felt as one of 

 wonder and awe. Such feeling is finely expressed by 

 Pascal and Kant in noble passages of their writings. 

 But it is lost by repetition, even to those who know 

 the grandeur of the objects the magnitudes, distances, 

 and periods of time, with which astronomy as a science 

 is concerned. We look at the full moon and on the 

 swelling tide of a great river, ignorant or failing to feel 

 the grandeur of that mysterious power which gives 

 physical connexion to objects seemingly thus remote. 

 Men and women come out of their crowded assemblies 

 at midnight and look up to the dome of heaven and 

 its ' patines of bright gold' with less interest than to 

 the ceiling of the theatre or the lights of the ballroon 

 they have just left. The great zone of the Milky Way, 

 with its lustre of innumerable worlds, is seen without 



