In addition to the nine bodies already specified, the solar system comprises a great variety of other and lesser bodies; no less than twenty-six moons or satellites tributary to the planets and traveling round them in various periods as the moon does round our earth. Then between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter are many thousands of asteroids, so called, or minor planets (about 1,000 of them have actually been discovered, and their paths accurately calculated). And at all sorts of angles with the planetary orbits are the paths of hundreds of comets, delicate filmy bodies of a wholly different constitution from the planets, and which now and then blaze forth in the sky, their tails appearing much like the beam of a searchlight, and compelling for the time the attention of everybody. Connected with the comets and doubtless originally parts of them are uncounted millions of millions of meteors, which for the time become a part of the solar system, their minute masses being attracted to the planets, upon which they fall, those hitting the earth being visible to us as familiar shooting stars. We next follow the story of astronomy through the solar system, beginning with the sun itself and proceeding outward through his family of planets, now much more numerous and vastly more extended than it was to the ancient world, or indeed till within a century and a half of our own day. CHAPTER XXV THE SUN AND OBSERVING IT As lord of day, king of the heavens, mankind in the ancient world adored the sun. By their researches into the epoch of the Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians and other early peoples now passed from earth, archæologists have unearthed many monuments that evidence the veneration in which the early peoples who inhabited Egypt and Asia Minor many thousand years ago held the sun. A striking example is found in the architecture of early Egyptian temples, on the lintels of which are carved representations of the winged globe or the winged solar disk, and there is a bare possibility that the wings of the globe were suggested by a type of the solar corona as glimpsed by the ancients. Little knew they about the distance and size of the sun; but the effects of his light and heat upon all vegetal and animal life were obvious to them. Doubtless this formed the basis for their worship of the sun. Occasional huge spots must have been visible to the naked eye, and the sun's corona was seen at rare intervals. Plutarch and Philostratus describe it very much as we see it to-day.