[SIGHTSEEING.]
DO you know, if I were in Paris one of the sights I should want to see would be the great telescope in the Observatory. Did you ever look through a great large one?
"How did we come to have telescopes, auntie?" I heard a little boy ask the other day as he passed the large one in the Park.
The auntie had not studied very carefully, for she said she supposed somebody found out how to make them; but she didn't know who he was, nor where he lived, nor when, nor how he happened to think of it. All these questions the boy asked, and had no answers save that tiresome one, "I don't know."
Perhaps other bright little boys are asking and getting no good answers. Let us see if we cannot find a little bit to tell them. In the first place, I think a man named Galileo had perhaps the most to do with inventing telescopes. Other people were studying into the matter, and trying to invent a machine that would be useful, but he is the first one who accomplished much.
He was born in Pisa, a little more than three hundred and fifty years ago. A smart boy was Galileo. He intended to be a doctor, and studied medicine when very young; but you never heard of such queer ideas as the doctors had in those days, and the more Galileo studied, the surer he felt that a great many of their teachings were nonsense. One evening when he was about eighteen years old, he stood in the great cathedral at Pisa and watched a hanging lamp that something had set in motion, and discovered that it swung back and forth with regular beats, very much as the little machine inside of him whose beats he could feel when he put his fingers on his wrist.
"Why!" said he to himself. "There seems to be some law regulating that motion; it keeps time with my pulse! Why couldn't there be a machine made that would beat so regularly it would measure time for us?" And that is the beginning of the story of all our clocks and watches.
It was the beginning too, of Galileo's study about the moon and the stars, and planning ways for finding out more about them. There is a long, long story about that which you will find it very interesting to read. I could not begin to tell you of the many difficulties in the way, nor what long hard work it took to learn to make a telescope like this one in the Observatory at Paris, for instance. A great many scholars helped to study it out. One man would find out one thing, and perhaps all the others would be sure it wasn't true. Then they would argue and experiment, and quarrel a little, and call one another hard names, and perhaps discover years afterwards that they were all mistaken. So the years went by, until now we have at great expense very wonderful telescopes indeed. But oh, how carefully they have to be made! There is hardly any other instrument which requires such careful handling as these. Why, the metal of which some of the parts are made has to be ground away so that at the edges it shall not be more than one hundredth part as thick as the paper on which our books are printed.
Just think what great pains people take, and how much money they spend to find out something about those worlds which twinkle all about us at night. The first chance you have to look through a good telescope, be sure to do it. Do you know I never look through one and see the wonders flashed before me, but I am reminded of the eye of God. How many things he sees that we cannot see at all. Things going on all about us, of which we know nothing. Think of a telescope that would show other people the thoughts of our hearts. Would you like to have such an instrument pointed at you, and people looking in to see what you thought about them? Yet the wonderful God can look all the time right into your heart and mine, and see every thought.