GENERAL SCIENCE 



CHAPTER I 

 THE EARTH 



The Earth's Relation to the Universe. The ancients 

 regarded the earth as the center of the universe and their 

 conception of it was a very natural one, both because 

 of its importance to them and because the heavenly 

 bodies actually appeared to revolve about the earth as 

 a center. Men saw the sun rise in the east and set in 

 the west every day, and the stars appear in nearly the 

 same positions every night. Hence they concluded that 

 the sun and stars all moved around the earth once in 

 twenty-four hours. 



They made careful observations, mapped out the 

 heavens, and recorded the positions of the stars. Grad- 

 ually they discovered that many of their ideas were 

 wrong, and little by little through hundreds of years the 

 real facts have become known concerning the vast or- 

 ganism which we call the universe. 



From these facts we find that the earth is but one of 

 a number of similar bodies called planets and is not at 

 all conspicuous among them. It is neither the largest 

 nor the smallest ; the farthest from nor nearest to the 

 suri. If we were to view it from some distant point, 

 we should be surprised at its comparative unimportance. 



