Terrestrial and Celestial Globes Volume 1

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The beginnings of the science of astronomy and of the science of geography are traceable to a remote antiquity. The earliest records which have come down to us out of the cradleland of civilization contain evidence that a lively interest in celestial and terrestrial phenomena was not wanting even in the day of history’s dawning. 


The primitive cultural folk of the Orient, dwellers in its great plateau regions, its fertile valleys, and its desert stretches were wont, as we are told, to watch the stars rise nightly in the east, sweep across the great “vaulted space above, and set in the west as if controlled in their apparent movement by living spirits. 


To them this exhibition was one marvelous and awe-inspiring. In the somewhat strange grouping of the stars they early fancied they could see the forms of many of the objects about them, of many of their gods and heroes, and we find their successors outlining these forms in picture in their representations of the heavens on the material spheres which they constructed. 


Crude and simple, however, were their astronomical theories relative to the shape, the structure, and the magnitude of the great universe in which they found themselves placed.


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