Man’s interest in them hitherto has been, as with other things, chiefly proprietary. Greed of them has grown so keen that legal questions have been raised of the ownership of their finding, and our courts have solemnly declared them not “wild game” but “real estate,” and as such belonging to the owner of the land on which they fall.
But to the scientific eye their estate is something more than “real,” for theirs is the oldest real estate in the solar system. They were what they are now when the Earth we pride ourselves in owning was but a molten mass.
So that when in future you see these strange stones in rows upon a museum’s shelves, regard them not as rarities, in which each museum strives to outdo its neighbors by the quantity it can possess, but as rosetta stones telling us of an epoch in cosmic history long since passed away—of which they alone hold the key. Look at them as the literary do their books, for that which they contain, not as the bibliophile to whom a misprint copy outvalues a corrected one and by whom “uncuts” are the most prized of all.
CHAPTER III
THE INNER PLANETS
When we recall that the Ptolemaic system of the universe was once taught side by side with the Copernican at Harvard and at Yale, we are impressed, not so much with the age of our universities, as with the youth of modern astronomy and with the extraordinary vitality of old ideas. That the Ptolemaic system in its fundamental principle was antiquated at the start, the older Greeks having had juster conceptions, does not lessen our wonder at its tenacity. But the fact helps us to understand why so much fossil error holds its ground in many astronomic text-books to-day. That stale intellectual bread is deemed better for the digestion of the young, is one reason why it often seems to them so dry.
Orbits of the Inner Planets.