Mistakes, of course, are made; how should it be otherwise? A man finding his way at night, for the first time, through a wild and unknown country, will almost certainly take some wrong turns before he discovers the right road. In astronomy, as in all other natural sciences, blunders are a necessity if advance is to be made. We have to grope our way to knowledge through observation and conjecture; in simpler terms, through gazing and guessing. Observation of facts leads to conjecture as to the possible causes for those facts; and each conjecture is proved by later observation to be either right or wrong. If proved to be right, it takes its place among accepted truths; if proved to be wrong, it is flung aside. Some pet delusions die hard, because of people’s love for them. Astronomy, as an infant science, mixed up with astrology, existed in the days when the Pyramids were juvenile, and when the Assyrian sculptures were modern. How much farther back who shall say? By astrology, those who studied the heavens endeavored to determine the fate of men and of nations, to predict events, and to interpret results. They paid particular attention to the aspect of the planets, and the general appearance of the firmament. These observations were at first simple remarks made by the shepherds of the Himalayas after sunset and before sunrise: The phases of the moon, and diurnal retrograde motion of that body with reference to the sun and stars; the apparent motion of the starry sky accomplished silently above our heads; the movements of the beautiful planets through the constellations; the shooting star, which seems to fall from the heavens; eclipses of the sun and moon, mysterious subjects of terror; curious comets, which appear with disheveled hair in the heights of heaven,--such were the first subjects of these old observations made during thousands of years. The ancient Chaldean star-gazers had rivals among the early Egyptians; and the Chinese profess to have kept actual record of eclipses during between three and four thousand years. The earlier records are not trustworthy; but of thirty-six eclipses reckoned by the Chinese sage, Confucius, no less than thirty-one have been proved true by modern astronomers. We can not name with certainty those people whose shepherds first gazed with intelligent eyes upon the midnight sky, and noted the steady sweep of stars across the firmament--intelligent eyes, that is to say, so far as man then knew how to use his eyes intelligently; so far as man had begun to note anything in nature, to watch, to compare, and to conjecture causes. In those times, and indeed for long afterwards, men thought much more about the “influences” of stars upon their own lives, and about supposed prophecies of the future to be read in the sky, than about the actual physical condition of the stars themselves, or the causes and meanings of the various phenomena observed in the heavens.