Finally Mother Earth called on Jupiter Pluvius, as god of thunder, rain, and storms, to stop Phaeton and the runaways and put out the fire.
Struck by a bolt of lightning poor Phaeton fell headlong from the skies, and a world-wide rain put out the world-wide fire.
From a cameo by Da Vinci
THE FALL OF PHAETON
(Museum, Florence)
Now, would you believe it, this queer old Old World story may really be true in its way. Of course there never was a sun god and no spoiled boy who did just that thing; although many spoiled boys have tried to set the world on fire and failed because they thought it would be so easy.
But the earth really has been on fire in a sense; that is, has melted from the heat. And in parts where you would least suspect—the rocks. There's where I got into it. And some of these rocks, not more than ten miles[3] from where you live, are either still molten, or continue to melt from time to time; as you can see when lava comes pouring from volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii.
[3] Straight down, of course.
In the days of the Apollo story most men still thought the earth was the centre of the universe; that the sun, moon, and stars moved around it. But Pythagoras, one of the Greek philosophers, had formed a general notion of the truth that the earth is only one planet in a great system. Then, along in the Sixteenth Century, came Copernicus, and by mathematical calculation—he was a fine hand at figures—began to find out things that showed the wise old Greek had made a happy guess. Then Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and others, each working on different parts of the problem, finally settled the question. They found that there are just worlds of worlds, and that ours is only one of them.