Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/18

 scintillates like the electrified cross-section of a rainbow. In the case of a double star where the colors are sharply contrasted—gold and blue or scarlet and green—the effect is startling and very beautiful. Weird looking purple stars and wan lavender ones may also be found, but all these lovely tints and shades are hidden among the hosts of more common yellow and white stars, and if one does not know just where to find them it is like hunting for treasure without a chart.

When the world was young, people gazed in never-ending wonder as the darkness of the heavens filled up with the lights of stars. According to an old Malayan story the stars were the children of the Moon-mother, who brought her children out only at night when the jealous sun, who had no children, was far away on the other side of the earth. The ancient Greeks believed that night came because the God of the Sun drove his sun-chariot along the invisible edge of the western ocean when he returned from the west to the east. All the natural laws of Nature were explained in some such naïve manner by the ancient peoples; the imagery of the Greeks is especially interesting, for they impressed shadowy figures on the very stars. These figures have given names to the constellations, or groups of stars, and to the student of Nature, the legends of these heroes traced in the sky add to the charm of the stars in the same manner that the delicate aroma of the rose enhances its loveliness.

Later, these remarkable people, in trying to account for the fixed and orderly movement of the stars as they slowly passed from east to west, adduced that they must be fastened in crystal spheres which whirled, one within the other, over and under the motionless disk of the earth. They noted that a few of these luminaries followed a wandering course, and so called them "planets"—which means "wandering stars." Since some of these wandering stars moved swiftly and others moved more slowly, they fancied, in