Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/55

 motion near the pivot of the starry dome had caused its handle to bend forward at a most precarious angle—surely nothing less than the immortality conferred upon it as a part of Ursa Minor could prevent it from flinging its bowl through the depths of space and whirling henceforth an uninteresting stub of a handle.

The Little Dipper is rather faintly outlined, the only bright stars being those which mark the extremities. The two more conspicuous stars were named "The Guards" for it was thought that they protected the "hole in which the axle of the earth is borne." This "hole," which was imagined as keeping in place the north pole of the heavens, is marked by the North Star. To be exact, the North Star does not mark its precise location but is about twice the diameter of the moon away from it. Such a small distance, however, is scarcely discernible to the eye.

As mentioned before, all the stars travel in unchanged order along their arcs from east to west except this one star which marks the north pole of the heavens. There is no star directly above the pole of the southern hemisphere of our earth. The North Star, or "Polaris," is therefore the only star which remains in an apparently fixed position in the sky, and all the other stars visible to us whirl around it as a center, although in most cases only a portion of their arcs may be seen. If the earth should falter or halt in its rotation, so would the whirl of the stars, and this remarkable exhibition, which is only a delusion dependent on the motion of the earth, would immediately cease to be.

Polaris has a minute blue companion star which may be viewed in a 2- or 3-inch telescope.