Looking at the earth as simply one among the innumerable hosts of heaven, it, like each one of them, becomes to the imagination a mere point of light, a “star among stars.” But, when we shift our point of view, and leaving the cosmical or universal for the special, for what pertains to the individual life, the mere point of light flames up into a great, busy world, full of phenomena demanding investigation and thought. And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. Science alone, the gift and the growth of centuries, can measure the field; science alone can enter it and reduce the chaos to a beautiful and orderly grouping, and make a perfect picture of the whole; it alone can dispel crude ideas and give truer ones in their stead. To the rude dweller on the plain, the earth seems a gigantic floor, as it did to many a tribe in the past, and as it does to-day to thousands of wondering Arabs. The South Sea Islander, in the Pacific, takes his island or island group to be the whole earth; the world he considers an endless ocean plain, from which the Sun arises, and, when the day is over, into which it sinks. And even within the pale of civilization itself, the ignorant Neapolitan lazzarone considers his gulf the center of the world. As men advance in their inquiries, and, ascending the sides of mountains, look out over a larger tract, or find new lands across the seas, they do not outgrow their first idea, the world merely expands from the narrow homestead to a larger circle, such as the Romans used to call their orbis terrarum. The conception of the earth as a vast, unsupported ball, careering through the heavens, was the possession, slowly won, of such great minds as Pythagoras and Aristotle, and slowly found its way among the ideas which whole nations accepted as true. Circumnavigators must sail around the globe and tell their story to the world before the conjectures of science could have real weight with the popular mind in a matter so remote from the crude speculations of the ignorant as this. And less than one century and a half ago (in 1727) another step was taken, and the theory was propounded by Newton, that the Earth is a spheroid and not a perfect sphere. Later investigations have determined that the spheroidal form is only an approximation to perfect accuracy, and that the Earth is a polyhedron, whose exact number of zodes has not yet been determined, and which may prove indeterminable. Bessel has assigned, as the great task of science for the coming century, to settle this question with perfect exactness. But what has been said is enough to indicate that in our knowledge, at present, certainly there is only progress, only approximation, no absolute exhaustion of the processes of discovery.