WHEN STARS ARE NEWS

There was a time when men told fortunes by the stars, when Louis XI quailed before the coursing of the planets, when Tycho Brahe observed the passage of a comet and thereupon fore told the coming of a scourge out of the North who should conquer and disappear. So was Gustavus Adolphus preceded by prophecy. So the stars entered intimately into the lives of men, Upon the story of the telescope nations waited in suspense.

But mathematics multiplied the distance of the heavens into infinity and the stars receded from the imagination of men into the dusty records of the Observatory. Spiral nebulae and the gaseous composition of a certain sun of the third magnitude have ceased to be news, not only to the general public but to the college which supports one of the finest observatories in the world. Monthly reports on the progress of man's knowledge of the universe promptly arrive on the city editor's desk and as promptly find their way to the waste- basket. The strange, the almost miraculous, certainly the overwhelmingly large, are recorded in them but they appear at best only in scientific magazines with a circulation of perhaps one thousand.

When, however, the sun is eclipsed by a process which has become tiresome, so often has it been repeated and so simple are its mechanics in comparison with those other events in the history of the stars, then astronomy finds the headlines of every newspaper in the country, then Dr. Shapley is besieged by reporters, and his work and that of his associates is the subject of columns of space. Likewise, the announcement that Harvard will establish a new station in South Africa finds its way into a prominent place in the evening newspapers under the heading. "Harvard Will Have Largest Telescope in Southern Hemisphere." That is news. But what great things that telescope discovers about the heavens will continue to find their way to the wastebasket. Are they too far away?