CHAPTER I
ASTRONOMY A LIVING SCIENCE
Like life itself we do not know when astronomy began; we cannot conceive a time when it was not. Man of the early stone age must have begun to observe sun, moon, and stars, because all the bodies of the cosmos were there, then as now. With his intellectual birth astronomy was born.
Onward through the childhood of the race he began to think on the things he observed, to make crude records of times and seasons; the Chaldeans and Chinese began each their own system of astronomy, the causes of things and the reasons underlying phenomena began to attract attention, and astronomy was cultivated not for its own sake, but because of its practical utility in supplying the data necessary to accurate astrological prediction. Belief in astrology was universal.
The earth set in the midst of the wonders of the sky was the reason for it all. Clearly the earth was created for humanity; so, too, the heavens were created for the edification of the race. All was subservient to man; naturally all was geocentric, or earth-centered. From the savage who could count only to five, the digits of one hand, civilized man very slowly began to evolve; he noted the progress of the seasons; the old records of eclipses showed Thales, an early Greek, how to predict their happenings, and true science had its birth when man acquired the power to make forecasts that always came true.
Few ancient philosophers were greater than Pythagoras, and his conceptions of the order of the heavens and the shape and motion of the earth were so near the truth that we sometimes wonder how they could have been rejected for twenty centuries. We must remember, however, that man had not yet learned the art of measuring things, and the world could not be brought into subjection to him until he had. To measure he must have tools—instruments; to have instruments he must learn the art of working in metals, and all this took time; it was a slow and in large part imperceptible process; it is not yet finished.
The earliest really sturdy manifestation of astronomical life came with the birth of Greek science, culminating with Aristarchus, Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The last of these great philosophers, realizing that only the art of writing prevents man's knowledge from perishing with him, set down all the astronomical knowledge of that day in one of the three greatest books on astronomy ever written, the Almagest, a name for it derived through the Arabic, and really meaning "the greatest."
The system of earth and heaven seemed as if finished, and the authority of Ptolemy and his Almagest were as Holy Writ for the unfortunate centuries that followed him. With fatal persistence the fundamental error of his system delayed the evolutionary life of the science through all that period.
But man had begun to measure. Geometry had been born and Eratosthenes had indeed measured the size of the earth. Tools in bronze and iron were fashioned closely after the models of tools of stone; astrolabes and armillary spheres were first built on geometric spheres and circles; and science was then laid away for the slumber of the Dark Ages.
Nevertheless, through all this dreary period the life of the youthful astronomical giant was maintained. Time went on, the heavens revolved; sun, moon, and stars kept their appointed places, and Arab and Moor and the savage monarchs of the East were there to observe and record, even if the world-mind was lying fallow, and no genius had been born to inspire anew that direction of human intellect on which the later growth of science and civilization depends. With the growth of the collective mind of mankind, from generation to generation, we note that ordered sequence of events which characterizes the development of astronomy from earliest peoples down to the age of Newton, Herschel, and the present. It is the unfolding of a story as if with a definite plot from the beginning.
Leaving to philosophical writers the great fundamental reason underlying the intellectual lethargy of the Dark Ages, we only note that astronomy and its development suffered with every other department of human activity that concerned the intellectual progress of the race. To knowledge of every sort the medieval spirit was hostile. But with the founding and growth of universities, a new era began. The time was ripe for Copernicus and a new system of the heavens. The discovery of the New World and the revival of learning through the universities added that stimulus and inspiration which marked the transition from the Middle Ages to our modern era, and the life of astronomy, long dormant, was quickened to an extraordinary development.