JOHN PHOENIX. SAN DIEGO OBSERVATORY, September 1, 1854.
The term Astronomy is derived from two Latin words,--_Astra_, a star, and _onomy_, a science; and literally means the science of the stars. "It is a science," to quote our friend Dick (who was no relation at all of Big Dick, though the latter occasionally caused individuals to see stars), "which has, in all ages, engaged the attention of the poet, the philosopher, and the divine, and been the subject of their study and admiration."
By the wondrous discoveries of the improved telescopes of modern times, we ascertain that upward of several hundred millions of stars exist, that are invisible to the naked eye--the nearest of which is millions of millions of miles from the Earth; and as we have every reason to suppose that every one of this inconceivable number of worlds is peopled like our own, a consideration of this fact--and that we are undoubtedly as superior to these beings as we are to the rest of mankind--is calculated to fill the mind of the American with a due sense of his own importance in the scale of animated creation.
It is supposed that each of the stars we see in the Heavens in a cloudless night is a sun shining upon its own curvilinear, with light of its own manufacture; and as it would be absurd to suppose its light and heat were made to be diffused for nothing, it is presumed farther, that each sun, like an old hen, is provided with a parcel of little chickens, in the way of planets, which, shining but feebly by its reflected light, are to us invisible. To this opinion we are led, also, by reasoning from analogy, on considering our own Solar System.
THE SOLAR SYSTEM is so called, not because we believe it to be the sole system of the kind in existence, but from its principal body, the Sun, the Latin name of which is _Sol_. (Thus we read of Sol Smith, literally meaning the _son_ of Old Smith.) On a close examination of the Heavens we perceive numerous brilliant stars which shine with a steady light (differing from those which surround them, which are always twinkling like a dewdrop on a cucumber-vine), and which, moreover, do not preserve constantly the same relative distance from the stars near which they are first discovered. These are the planets of the SOLAR SYSTEM, which have no light of their own--of which the Earth, on which we reside, is one--which shine by light reflected from the Sun--and which regularly move around that body at different intervals of time and through different ranges in space. Up to the time of a gentleman named Copernicus, who flourished about the middle of the Fifteenth Century, it was supposed by our stupid ancestors that the Earth was the center of all creation, being a large, flat body resting on a rock which rested on another rock, and so on "all the way down"; and that the Sun, planets and immovable stars all revolved about it once in twenty-four hours.