ABSTRACT
The world has grown terribly small of recent years, and the solar system itself occupies but a minor speck in the awful illimitable spaces of which astronomers tell us, where the massed noughts at the end of a computation fail to impress the normal mortal, who is accustomed to deal with mere thousands and millions. It was otherwise in the Middle Ages, when this earth was the centre of the Universe, with the obliging and regular sun and moon circling around it, and the planets (or such of them as were known) working in more puzzling orbits—mainly for the benefit of astrologers casting horoscopes. The geocentric theory (a most barbarous term) was universally accepted, and the first scientists who ventured to suggest that the earth went round the sun, and not the sun around the earth, got into terrible trouble with the authorities, not for astronomical speculation but for heresy. They were teaching a theory which was ruled to be a leaving from some of the more perverse of the ancient classical astronomers, and in blasphemous contradiction to scores of texts in the Bible, primarily (of course) to the first chapter of Genesis, which laid down the ruling that the earth was created before the sun, who began his daily course only after our own terrestrial habitation had already come into existence.
