A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
If you would enter one of the old buildings there is naught to hinder.
Go into one of the lecture-halls which chances at the moment to be
unoccupied, and you will see an array of crude old benches for seats
that look as if they might have been placed there at the very inaugural
of the institution. The boards that serve for desks, if you scan them
closer, you will find scarred all over with the marks of knives, showing
how some hundreds of successive classes of listeners have whiled away
the weary lecture-hours. Not a square inch can you find of the entire
desk surface that is un-scarred. If one would woo a new sensation, he
has but to seat himself on one of these puritanical old benches and
conjure up in imagination the long series of professors that may have
occupied the raised platform in front, recalling the manner of thought
and dogma that each laid down as verity. He of the first series appears
in the garb of the sixteenth century, with mind just eagerly striving to
peer a little way out of the penumbra of the Renaissance. The students
who carve the first gashes in the new desks will learn, if perchance
they listen in intervals of whittling, that this World on which they
live is perhaps not flat, but actually round, like a ball. It is
debatable doctrine, to be sure, but we must not forget that Signor
Columbus, recently dead, found land off to the west which is probably a
part of the Asiatic continent. If the earth be indeed a ball, then the
sun and stars whirl clear around it in twenty-four hours, travelling
thus at an astonishing speed, for the sphere in which they are fastened
is situated hundreds of miles away. The sun must be a really great ball
of fire--perhaps a mile even in diameter. The moon, as is plain to see,
is nearly as large. The stars, of course, are only sparks, though of
great brilliancy. They are fixed in a different sphere from that of the
sun. In still other spheres are the moon, and a small set of large stars
called planets, of which latter there are four, in order that, with the
sun, the moon, and the other stars, there may be made seven orders of
heavenly bodies--seven being, of course, the magic number in accordance
with which the universe is planned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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