Elementary Astronomy

Excerpt from Elementary Astronomy: A Beginner's Text-Book
The first notions of Astronomy are acquired in the study of Geography. Geography lays special stress on the fact that the surface of the Earth is in a state of constant change. Its oceans and its atmosphere are subject to tides; its surface is leveled for the sites of cities and towns; its mines and quarries are explored for substances useful to mankind. Men navigate its seas and use its soils to produce the food that supports them. Its ceaseless changes, natural and artificial, give to it a kind of life - for the sign of life is change.
Geography teaches, also, that the Earth is one of the planets, but in this larger relation says little or nothing of changes taking place in the solar system. The young student is very apt to conclude that the other planets of whose existence he knows - Venus and Jupiter for example - are changeless, immutable; that they are bright points of light without a history. This was the view of the ancients.
The special business of Astronomy is to develop the ideas of the student so that he may understand that all the bodies of the Solar system - the Sun and all the planets - are themselves subject to ceaseless changes and are thus endowed with a kind of life. Not only this; the bodies throughout the whole universe - Sun and stars alike - are perpetually altering both their places and the arrangement of their separate parts. Our life on the Earth, for instance, would quickly cease were it not for changes in the Sun.
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