Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/32

 One of the many duties of the gods was to see that the earth was properly lighted by the sun and the moon, and that the stars were "penned in" at dawn and "unpenned" nightly. The sun, moon and stars rose and sank in the stream of the ocean, but the sun, instead of being submerged, was carried around the stream from west to east in a winged cup or golden boat made by the god Vulcan. It was at first thought that Vulcan, with a mighty heave, threw the hot sun-ball over the Caucasus mountains in the east to the Atlantic ocean in the west, and then hastily paddled around the world stream to catch it as it fell, but later it was believed that Apollo, the Sun-god, drove it across the sky in a chariot, the return journey to the country of the sunrise being accomplished by placing both chariot and sun in Vulcan's remarkable boat. Centuries later (about 336 ) Eudoxus evolved the theory of the concentric crystalline spheres which brought the tracks of