The discoveries made with the telescope produced, as time went on, a great alteration in the notions of men with regard to the universe at large. It must have been, indeed, a revelation to find that those points of light which they called the planets, were, after all, globes of a size comparable with the earth, and peopled perchance with sentient beings. Even to us, who have been accustomed since our early youth to such an idea, it still requires a certain stretch of imagination to enlarge, say, the Bright Star of Eve, into a body similar in size to our earth. The reader will perhaps recollect Tennyson's allusion to this in _Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After_:-- "Hesper--Venus--were we native to that splendour or in Mars, We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars. "Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite, Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?" The form of instrument as devised by Galileo is called the Refracting Telescope, or "Refractor." As we know it to-day it is the same in principle as his "optick tube," but it is not quite the same in construction. The early _object-glass_, or large glass at the end, was a single convex lens (see Fig. 8, p. 113, "Galilean"); the modern one is, on the other hand, composed of two lenses fitted together. The attempts to construct large telescopes of the Galilean type met in course of time with a great difficulty. The magnified image of the object observed was not quite pure; its edges, indeed, were fringed with rainbow-like colours. This defect was found to be aggravated with increase in the size of object-glasses. A method was, however, discovered of diminishing this colouration, or _chromatic aberration_ as it is called from the Greek word [chrôma] (_chroma_), which means colour, viz. by making telescopes of great length and only a few inches in width. But the remedy was, in a way, worse than the disease; for telescopes thus became of such huge proportions as to be too unwieldy for use. Attempts were made to evade this unwieldiness by constructing them with skeleton tubes (see Plate II., p. 110), or, indeed, even without tubes at all; the object-glass in the tubeless or "aerial" telescope being fixed at the top of a high post, and the _eye-piece_, that small lens or combination of lenses, which the eye looks directly into, being kept in line with it by means of a string and manoeuvred about near the ground (Plate III., p. 112). The idea of a telescope without a tube may appear a contradiction in terms; but it is not really so, for the tube adds nothing to the magnifying power of the instrument, and is, in fact, no more than a mere device for keeping the object-glass and eye-piece in a straight line, and for preventing the observer from being hindered by stray lights in his neighbourhood. It goes without saying, of course, that the image of a celestial object will be more clear and defined when