s between Mars and Venus (between War and Love),
circulating like her brothers of the solar system, around the colossal
Sun.

The Earth! The name evokes in us the image of Life, and calls up the
theater of our activities, our ambitions, our joys and sorrows. Does it
not, in fact, to ignorant eyes, represent the whole of the universe?

And yet, what is the Earth?

The Earth is a star in the Heavens. We learned this much in our first
lesson. It is a globe of opaque material, similar to the planets
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc., as previously described. Isolated
on all sides in space, it revolves round the Sun, along a vast orbit
that it accomplishes in a year. And while it thus glides along the lines
of solar attraction, the terrestrial ball rotates rapidly upon itself in
twenty-four hours.

These statements may appear dubious at first sight, and contradictory to
the evidence of our senses.

Now that the surface of the Earth has been explored in all directions,
there is no longer room to doubt that it is a globe, a sort of ball that
we adhere to. A journey round the world is common enough to-day, and
always yields the most complete evidence of the spherical nature of the
Earth. On the other hand, the curvature of the seas is a no less certain
proof. When a ship reaches the dark-blue line that appears to separate
the sky from the ocean, it seems to be hanging on the horizon. Little by
little, however, as it recedes, it drops below the horizon line; the
tops of the masts being the last to disappear. The observer on board
ship witnesses the same phenomenon. The low shores are first to
disappear, while the high coasts and mountains are much longer visible.

The aspect of the Heavens gives another proof of the Earth's rotundity.
As one travels North or South, new stars rise higher and higher above
the horizon in the one direction or the other, and those which shine in
the latitude one is leaving, gradually disappear. If the surface of the
Earth were flat, the ships on the sea would be visible as long as our
sight could pierce the distance, and all the stars of the Heavens would
be equally visible from the different quarters of the world.

Lastly, during the eclipses of the Moon, the shadow projected by the
Earth upon our satellite is always round. This is another proof of the
spherical nature of the terrestrial globe.

We described the Earth as an orb in the Heavens, similar to all the
other planets of the great