Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/86

60 the planets has been improved. And this knowledge it is which has made possible our study of their evolution as worlds.

Could we get a cosmic view of the solar system by leaving the world we live on for some suitable vantage-point in space, two attributes of it would impose themselves upon us—the general symmetry of the whole, and the impressively graded proportions of its particular parts.

Round a great central globular mass, the Sun, far exceeding in size any of his attendants, circle a series of bodies at distances from him quite vast, compared with their dimensions. These, his principal planets, are in their turn centres to satellite systems of like character, but on a correspondingly reduced scale. All of them travel substantially in one plane, a fact giving the system thus seen in its entirety a remarkably level appearance, as of an ideal surface passing through the centre of the Sun. Departing somewhat from this general uniformity in their directions of motion, and also deviating more from circularity in their paths, some much smaller bodies, a certain distance out, dart now up now down across it at different angles and from all the points of the compass, agreeing with the others only in having the centre of the Sun their seemingly never attained goal of endeavor. These bodies are the asteroids. Surrounding the