There is nothing more dignified, more sublime, more awful, than a contemplation of the heavens. In point of grandeur, astronomy may be regarded as king of the sciences. It is also their patriarch. Thousands of years before the birth of Christ the priests of Chaldea, from the tops of their flat-roofed temples, studied the stars and laid the foundations of the science of astronomy. The heavens, with their teeming, whirling, circling congregation, obeying laws that have no "variableness neither shadow of turning" do, indeed, "declare the glory of God." From the earliest times the stars were supposed to influence for good and ill the lives of men. There were supposed to be stars of good luck and of bad omen. The cool, calculating Cassius tells Brutus, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." When you look up into the heavens at the flickering dots of light which we call the stars, you are looking at worlds, many of them far larger than our earth. They seem small because of vast distances from us. Our own solar system, great as it is, in comparison with the celestial universe is but a clod in an acre. At the center of our system is the sun, a huge ball of fiery matter 93,000,000 miles from the earth, and as large as 330,000 worlds like ours. Circling around the sun like maddened horses around a race course are eight planets. These planets, with the sun and some comets, constitute our solar system; _our_ system, for how many solar systems there are in space no one knows. These planets, in their order outward from the sun, are Mercury, Venus, our Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Of these, Mercury is the smallest and Jupiter is the largest. The following table shows some interesting facts about the planets: