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The Shape of Our Earth
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Groups of Stars
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How To Know the Stars
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Some Other Worlds
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Our Placid Companion
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In Strong Contrast
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Sizes and Distances
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Air and Water
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Mountains and Craters
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Day and Night
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Cooling Bodies
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The Pathway of Venus
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Possible Climates
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What We See of Mars
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Two Little Moons
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Canals and Marshes
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Is Mars Inhabited?
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Little and Great
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Still Rather Warm
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Is Jupiter Inhabited?
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A Wondrous Planet
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Mutual Influences
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The Power of Attraction
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Rough Ore of the Universe
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A Reduced Scale
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Angles and Triangles
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But—the Stars?
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One among Many
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The Sun's Make
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Spots and "Flames"
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Suns and Their Planets
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Varieties of Stars
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Small Wavelets
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The Nature of Light
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History in Starlight
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A General Whirl
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Star-Clusters and Nebulae
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Far-Reaching!
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Immensity—and Man
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Front Matter
Foreword to New Edition
M
ANY years ago a small volume under this title was
published by the S.P.C.K. When a letter came, asking me
to revise it for re-issue in an illustrated form, I
speedily found that to "revise" meant to "re-write."
And re-written it has been during the past few months,
with abundant omissions and still more abundant
additions. Except possibly here or there in the first
few pages, I doubt if a single sentence has kept its
old form unaltered. And though in the main I have
roughly followed the outlines of my former plan, it has
been largely reconstructed, and very many of the
chapters are entirely new.
I have to express my grateful thanks to Mr. W. H.
Wesley, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Astronomical
Society; Mr. E. Walter Maunder, F.R.A.S.; Professor H.
H. Turner, F.R.S., Director of the University
Observatory of Oxford; Professor E. B. Frost, Director
of Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin; Mr. Harlow Shapley,
of Mount Wilson Observatory, California, and others,
for most kind help given in the work of re-writing, by
their ready response to inquiries on my part about
difficult questions and new developments.
My thanks also are due to several poets of the present
day, whose names will be found here and there, as well
as to their publishers, for leave kindly granted
for the use of their poems both in this and in a
companion-volume on the subject of Plant-life, which
is to appear a little later. So while the latter will
be about flowers on our Earth, this one is about more
flaming blossoms in the Garden of the Skies. As wrote
Erasmus Wilson, long ago—
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"Flowers of the sky; ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field."
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In both books I have given quotations, not only from
modern poets, but from many of bygone generations. It
is always interesting to note the manner in which great
scientific truths are received by widely-differing
minds, gifted with poetic insight. Perhaps not least so
with writers of a past age, when that which was known,
alike of life on our small world and of conditions in
the great Universe, could hardly be compared with what
is known to us now.
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