That what we take offhand to be purely astronomic phenomena should turn out to be so essentially of the particular world, worldly, clarifies vision of what these really are, and how dependent on and interwoven with everyday life astronomy is. Or, we may consider it turned about and realize how purely astronomic relations, such abstract mechanical matters as rotations and revolutions, result in completely changing the very face and character of the globe concerned. Mercury to-day stares forever at the Sun. The markings we see have stereotyped this stare to its inevitable result. For they seem to mark a globe sun-cracked. At such a condition the curious crisscross of dark, irregular lines certainly hints, accentuated and perfected as it is by a bounding curve where the mean sunward side terminates to the enclosing them as by the carapace of a tortoise. Though they cannot probably be actual cracks, however much they may resemble such, yet they may well owe their existence to that fundamental cause. In color the planet is ghastly white; of that wan hue that suggests a body from which all life has fled. Far whiter than Venus in point of fact, the rosy tint with which it sparkles in the sunset glow is all borrowed of the dying day and vanishes when the planet is looked at in the uncompromising light of noon. Seen close together once at Flagstaff it was possible directly to compare the two; when Mercury, although lit by the Sun two and a half times as brilliantly as Venus, was, surface for surface, more than twice as faint. Müller has found its intrinsic brightness about that of our Moon, which in some respects it resembles, though it apparently departs widely from any similarity in others. The bleached bones of a world; that is what Mercury seems to be. Venus comes next in order outward from the Sun. To us her incomparable beauty is partly the result of propinquity: nearness to ourselves and nearness to the Sun. Relatively so close is she to both that she does not need the Sun’s withdrawal to appear, but may nearly always be seen in the daytime in clear air if one knows where to look for her. Situate about seven-tenths of our own distance from our common giver of light and heat, she gets about double the amount that falls to our lot, so that her surface is proportionately brilliantly illuminated. Being also relatively near us, she displays a correspondingly large surface.