Читать книгу Star-land: Being Talks With Young People About the Wonders of the Heavens онлайн

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Picture to yourself the earth as receiving a stream of sunbeams. These beams fall on one half of our globe, and give to it the brilliance of day. The other half of the earth of course receives no sunlight. It is in the shadow, and consequently the darkness of night there prevails. The boundary between light and darkness is not quite sharply defined, for the pleasant twilight softens it a little, so that we pass gradually from day to night. Looking at the progress of the sun in the course of the day, we see that he rises far away in the east, then he gradually moves across the heavens past the south, and in the evening declines to the west, sets, and disappears. All through the night the sun is gradually moving round the opposite side of the earth, illuminating New Zealand and Japan and other remote countries, and then gradually working round to the east, where he starts afresh to give us a new day here.

Our ancestors many ages ago did not know that the earth was round. They thought it was a great flat plain, and that it extended endlessly in every direction. They were, however, much puzzled about the sun. They could see from the coasts of France and Spain or Britain that the sun gradually disappeared in the ocean; they thought that it actually took a plunge into the sea. This would certainly quench the glowing sun; and some of the ancients used to think they heard the dreadful hissing noise when the great red-hot body dropped into the Atlantic. But there was here a difficulty. If the sun were to be chilled down every evening by dropping into the water hundreds of miles away to the west, how did it happen that early the next morning he came up as fresh and as hot as ever, hundreds of miles away to the east? For this, indeed, it seemed hard to account. Some said that we had an entirely new sun every day. The gods started the sun far off in the east, and after having run its course it perished in the west. All the night the gods were busy preparing a new sun to be used on the succeeding day. But this was thought to be such a waste of good suns that a more economical theory was afterwards proposed. The ancients believed that the continents of the earth, so far as they knew them, were surrounded by a limitless ocean. At the north, there were high mountains and ice and snow, which they thought prevented access to this ocean from civilized regions. Vulcan was the presiding deity who navigated those wastes of waters, and to him was intrusted the responsible duty of saving the sun from extinction. He had a great boat ready, so that when the sun was just dropping into the ocean at sunset he caught it, and during all the night he paddled with his glorious cargo round by the north. The glow of the sun during the voyage could even be sometimes traced in summer over the great highlands to the north. This, at all events, was their way of accounting for the long midsummer twilight. After a tedious night’s voyage Vulcan got round to the east in good time for sunrise. Then he shot the sun up with such terrific force that it would go across the whole sky, and then the industrious deity paddled back with all his might by the way he had come, so as to be ready to catch the sun in the evening and thus repeat his never-ending task.