There is nothing more dignified, more sublime, more awful, than a contemplation of the heavens. In point of grandeur, astronomy may be regarded as king of the sciences. It is also their patriarch. Thousands of years before the birth of Christ the priests of Chaldea, from the tops of their flat-roofed temples, studied the stars and laid the foundations of the science of astronomy. The heavens, with their teeming, whirling, circling congregation, obeying laws that have no "variableness neither shadow of turning" do, indeed, "declare the glory of God."
From the earliest times the stars were supposed to influence for good and ill the lives of men. There were supposed to be stars of good luck and of bad omen. The cool, calculating Cassius tells Brutus,
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
When you look up into the heavens at the flickering dots of light which we call the stars, you are looking at worlds, many of them far larger than our earth. They seem small because of vast distances from us. Our own solar system, great as it is, in comparison with the celestial universe is but a clod in an acre. At the center of our system is the sun, a huge ball of fiery matter 93,000,000 miles from the earth, and as large as 330,000 worlds like ours. Circling around the sun like maddened horses around a race course are eight planets. These planets, with the sun and some comets, constitute our solar system; our system, for how many solar systems there are in space no one knows. These planets, in their order outward from the sun, are Mercury, Venus, our Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Of these, Mercury is the smallest and Jupiter is the largest. The following table shows some interesting facts about the planets:
| Name | Diameter in miles | Number of planets required to equal sun in size | Distance from sun in millions of miles | Time required for one revolution around sunin days | Velocity in orbit, miles per hour |
| Mercury | 3,008 | 5,000,000 | 36 | 88 | 107,012 |
| Venus | 7,480 | 425,000 | 66 | 225 | 78,284 |
| Earth | 7,926 | 332,260 | 92 | 365¼ | 66,579 |
| Mars | 4,999 | 3,093,500 | 141 | 687 | 53,938 |
| Jupiter | 88,439 | 1,048 | 483 | 4,332 | 29,203 |
| Saturn | 75,036 | 3,502 | 886 | 10,759 | 21,560 |
| Uranus | 30,875 | 22,600 | 1,783 | 30,687 | 15,202 |
| Neptune | 37,205 | 19,400 | 2,794 | 60,127 | 12,156 |
The moon is 240,000 miles from the earth, and it would require nearly 24,500,000 moons to equal the sun in size. Other planets have moons, some of them several. If you lived on the planet Mercury, your annual birthday would come around about once in three of our months. If you had your home out on the border land of the solar system, on the planet Neptune, you would have a birthday once in about 165 years, as we count time on the earth. It will be observed that the closer the planet is to the sun, the faster it travels in its orbit. This fact is due to the power of gravitation toward the sun. This strange influence drives the planets around the sun, and the nearer the planet is to the sun the greater is the power and consequently the faster the revolution. The law of gravitation was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton.
Newton was born in 1642 in Lincolnshire, England. His father was a farmer, and the farmhouse in which the son was born is still preserved. He was educated at a grammar school in Lincolnshire, and later entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he was graduated in 1665. Early in life he displayed a great liking for mathematics. Within a few years after he entered college, he had mastered the leading mathematical works of the day and had begun to make some progress in original mathematical investigation.
Newton's great life work—the achievement which insured to his name a place among the immortals—was suggested to him by accident. As the story goes, while he was walking one day in a garden, he saw an apple fall from a tree. He speculated upon the reasons for its falling, and ultimately concluded that the same force which causes an apple to fall from a tree holds the heavenly bodies in their places. Further investigation brought him to the unfolding of this general law of gravitation: "Every body in nature attracts every other body with a force directly as its mass, and inversely as the square of its distance." This law is the greatest law of nature. It is the central fact of the physical universe, the cement of the material world, the mighty, mystic shepherdess of space, that keeps the planets from wandering off alone. It is this awful, silent power reaching out from the enormous mass of the sun, that lashes the planets in their furious race, and yet holds them tightly reined in their orbits.
Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians, scientists, and thinkers in the history of the world. He died at Kensington, England, on March 20, 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, with the illustrious dead of Great Britain.