in the heavens. But the astronomers at Greenwich paid no attention to a request they regarded as being both impertinent and absurd. A year later Leverrier sent a similar request to Berlin. The Germans, more credulous or more ardent in the search for truth, eagerly complied. Their faith was rewarded, for a new planet swung into their vision. The great planet Neptune had been discovered. Leverrier and Galle, the observer at the Berlin observatory, got the credit and the honor of the discovery, which the obtuseness of his fellow countrymen lost for Adams and England. And yet to astronomers this is thoroughly prosaic.

The astronomer who repudiates the romance of his profession shows himself in his own life to be an extremely nonpractical, idealistic man. He makes a fetish of his profession. He lives for

that and that alone. One famous American astronomer gives four hours every evening to scanning the heavens, giving up the period ordinarily devoted to amusement, to relaxation, to enjoying the society of one's family or friends. He sits at a desk, with a canopy about him, shutting him off from the world, with his eye glued to some lone star burning in the heaven countless millions of miles away. He is a specialist of the extremest sort. His work consists merely in estimating the relative brightness of some star as measured by the North or Polar Star. An assistant sits nearby outside the canopy, jotting down observations as they are signalled to him from within. Only on cloudy or foggy nights can this scientist be persuaded to stay away from his beloved observatory. If, on one of these occasions, he should be induced to attend the theater, he goes out between the acts to see if the sky has cleared. If it has, he leaves at once, wholly regardless of the fact that the play is at the most critical stage.

Still another astronomer, a woman, discovered more variable stars than any other astronomer of the time. Day after day she came to her office to do her day's work-six hours. Before her on her

I have looked through a telescope only two or three times in my life."

The environment in which the astronomer works contains peril for the amateur or the unwary. On a beautiful moonlight night, the astronomer at one of the greatest observatories in this country was expecting a visit from a young girl friend, who wished to view the heavens through a telescope. By chance, the astronomer had been called to another town, and so the girl made her way to the dome alone, where the telescope was pointed at the moon. For two hours, fascinated, she kept her eye fixed to the instrument-observing, in wonder, the mountain ridges, and the

A WHIRLING MASS THAT WILL GIVE BIRTH TO NEW

WORLDS

The Great Nebula in Orion, which to laymen is one of the most gorgeous spectacles known to man, with its millions of miles of glowing, boiling gases.

craters of dead volcanoes. When she retired for the night, something seemed wrong with her eye, but she thought little of it, believing this to be due to the strain of long gazing. When she awoke in the morning, she found she was blind in one eye. The steady, concentrated light had killed the optic nerve.

There is the humorous aspect, too. The assistant in charge of a certain observatory left two visitors alone in the dome for a few minutes. When he returned, one of them said casually: "The lens of that telescope was so dusty that I rubbed it off with my glove." The scratches caused by this seemingly harmless operation necessitated the unmounting of the lens and an expenditure of five hundred dollars to restore the smooth surface. The visitor did not know that telescopic lenses are ordinarily cleaned but once or twice a year and then by suction process, because even a finger touch may ruin the perfect surface.

In the world of astronomy, humor and adventure may go hand in hand. When a certain observatory was erected on a high mountain in Peru some years ago, the staff in charge was considerably annoyed by the hostility of the natives. The latter evidently regarded the great rounded dome with the telescope projecting from the slits in the sides as a fort erected by the hated Americans for some ulterior purpose, and every now and then some patriotic son of the land would sneak up and take a shot at the observatory. And yet the prosaic astronomers were alarmed only lest one of the badly aimed balls might find a lodging in a telescopic lens, or do other damage to the telescope!

Only one astronomer of real fame to have used his imagination scientifically in seeking knowledge of other worlds. This man has made a specialty of the planet Mars, and has frequently expressed his belief that the lines across its face are in reality canals -bordered with rich vegetation which disappears in winter-built by the people of that strange world for irrigating pur

poses. Because of this theory, ways and means have at intervals been proposed to signal to the Martians.

Aside from the language of love, there is probably but one universal language. But inasmuch as it would be entirely useless for a youth or maiden on either the earth or Mars to exchange messages no matter how ardent either might be, since they couldn't understand each other, the attempts at communication must be in terms of the other universal language-the language of mathematics. So for interstellar communication we must fall back on mathematics.

A most ingenious suggestion is that a vast, comparatively level waste place, like the Desert of Sahara, be selected, for the purpose of laying out an enormous right angle triangle. Two of the sides might be one thousand miles in length by a hundred miles each in thickness. The third side would of course be longer. The triangle could then be overlaid with electric lights. With this triangle powerfully illuminated, it should not be difficult for the scientific Martians to read and understand the signal. They might reply in kind, and thus with variations of the triangle a system for correspondence might be built up. The two drawbacks to the scheme are that there may be no one on Mars to see such signals and to reply to them, and the enormous difficulty and expense of the undertaking. To build and illuminate. such a triangle would be a greater feat than the digging of the Panama Canal. A plan of this sort is a fascinating dream to the man in the street-but to the astronomer, a mere prosaic suggestion, and one that is not received any too well.

But, nevertheless, it may be for some such purpose of interplanetary communication that our patient, apparently impractical, astronomers may be laying up their store of knowledge for future generations. Even as it is they have proved that the matter which fills space is essentially the same; they have analyzed the metals in the sun; they have