HAECKEL AND THE NEW ZOOLOGY 



of professors that may have occupied the raised plat- 

 form in front, recalling the manner of thought and 

 dogma that each laid down as verity. He of the first 

 series appears in the garb of the sixteenth century, 

 with mind just eagerly striving to peer a little way out 

 of the penumbra of the Renaissance. The students 

 who carve the first gashes in the new desks will learn, 

 if perchance they listen in intervals of whittling, that 

 this world on which they live is perhaps not flat, but 

 actually round, like a ball. It is debatable doctrine, 

 to be sure, but we must not forget that Signer Colum- 

 bus, recently dead, found land off to the west which is 

 probably a part of the Asiatic continent. If the earth 

 be indeed a ball, then the sun and stars whirl clear 

 around it in twenty-four hours, travelling thus at an 

 astonishing speed, for the sphere in which they are 

 fastened is situated hundreds of miles away. The sun 

 must be a really great ball of fire perhaps a mile 

 even in diameter. The moon, as is plain to see, is 

 nearly as large. The stars, of course, are only sparks, 

 though of great brilliancy. They are fixed in a dif- 

 ferent sphere from that of the sun. In still other 

 spheres are the moon, and a small set of large stars 

 called planets, of which latter there are four, in order 

 that, with the sun, the moon, and the other stars, 

 there may be made seven orders of heavenly bodies 

 seven being, of course, the magic number in accordance 

 with which the universe is planned. 



This is, in substance, the whole subject of astronomy, 

 as that first professor must have taught it, even were 

 he the wisest man of his time. Of the other sciences, 

 except an elementary mathematics, there was hardly 



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