ere familiar to men upon the earth. Imagination quickly saw in
them the semblances of heroes and of mighty fabled beasts; and, around
these monstrous shapes, legends were woven, which told how the great
deeds done in the misty dawn of historical time had been enshrined by
the gods in the sky as an example and a memorial for men. Though the
centuries have long outlived such fantasies, yet the constellation
figures and their ancient names have been retained to this day, pretty
well unaltered for want of any better arrangement. The Great and Little
Bears, Cassiopeia, Perseus, and Andromeda, Orion and the rest, glitter
in our night skies just as they did centuries and centuries ago.

Many persons seem to despair of gaining any real knowledge of astronomy,
merely because they are not versed in recognising the constellations.
For instance, they will say:--"What is the use of my reading anything
about the subject? Why, I believe I couldn't even point out the Great
Bear, were I asked to do so!" But if such persons will only consider for
a moment that what we call the Great Bear has no existence in fact, they
need not be at all disheartened. Could we but view this familiar
constellation from a different position in space, we should perhaps be
quite unable to recognise it. Mountain masses, for instance, when seen
from new directions, are often unrecognisable.

It took, as we have seen, a very long time for men to acknowledge the
immense distances of the stars from our earth. Their seeming
unchangeableness of position was, as we have seen, largely responsible
for the idea that the earth was immovable in space. It is a wonder that
the Copernican system ever gained the day in the face of this apparent
fixity of the stars. As time went on, it became indeed necessary to
accord to these objects an almost inconceivable distance, in order to
account for the fact that they remained apparently quite undisplaced,
notwithstanding the journey of millions of miles which the earth was now
acknowledged to make each year around the sun. In the face of the
gradual and immense improvement in telescopes, this apparent immobility
of the stars was, however, not destined to last. The first ascertained
displacement of a star, namely that of 61 Cygni, noted by Bessel in the
year 1838, definitely proved to men the truth of the Copernican system.
Since then some forty more stars have been found to show similar tiny
displacements. We are, therefore, in poss