For the astrology and poetry and romance of the planets one must go elsewhere. Nearly every book on the subject of the planets--and there are many of them--has some information about these things; and properly, too, for every genuine emotion and every real fancy has its value. But neither curious lore of the planets nor the sentiment and emotion they have produced in others is what the author of this book is striving to set forth. It is something much more vital than this. What we wish to contemplate here are the plain facts, the knowledge of which enlivens and enriches one’s mind and nature. If the contemplation of them kindles one’s fancy or excites one’s emotions, these results at least will not be second-hand. If the bare facts, simply and plainly told, and the view of the planets themselves as they wander through their courses in the sky, do not awaken one’s understanding and imagination, no amount of poetry or romance that other people have built up around the planets will arouse anything more than a factitious interest in them. It is when our own faculties are at work and our own fancy plays over a subject that we become genuinely and lastingly interested in it. The facts themselves are in the main quite simple, and will not be given here as anything else than that. They have been fairly wrested from that mysterious thing called space by the mighty power of mind and unceasing labor. Our knowledge of them is due to long nights of watching and long days of calculating; to long and careful testing and considering of theories, only to find that something else must be tried; to courage to begin all over again, to sudden inspirations, and sometimes to those lucky discoveries that seem almost like miracles. The subject of the planets has in some respects a greater interest even than that of the stars, because we know, after all, more about them. We sometimes have a feeling, though, that we know more of the stars, although the stars are so much farther off. Why we have this feeling it is easy to explain. Knowing them to be so far removed from us, we really approach the stars with a different expectation. The few things that we have learned about them have in themselves such a magnitude that it makes them seem a greater body of knowledge than they truly are. The stars are indeed so far away, and what we know of them has to be expressed in such large terms, that the mind does not demand in that information the minute exactness that it seeks for in the case of nearer objects.