After an evening of talk, perhaps about the fringes of knowledge, or some new possibility of climbing into the minds and senses of animals, we would go out on the lawn, where we took turns at an amusing little astronomical rite. We searched until we found, with or without glasses, the faint, heavenly spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, when one or the other of us would then recite:
“That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. “It is as large as our Milky Way.
“It is one of a hundred million galaxies. “It is 750,000 light-years away.
“It consists of one hundred billion suns,
each larger than our sun.”
After an interval, Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: “Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.”
We must have repeated this salutary ceremony forty or fifty times in the course of years, and it never palled.
From The Book of Naturalists
A healthy persepctve on n how small and delicate we are is sometimes ncesssary.
“That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. “It is as large as our Milky Way.
“It is one of a hundred million galaxies. “It is 750,000 light-years away.
“It consists of one hundred billion suns,
each larger than our sun.”
After an interval, Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: “Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.”
We must have repeated this salutary ceremony forty or fifty times in the course of years, and it never palled.
From The Book of Naturalists
A healthy persepctve on n how small and delicate we are is sometimes ncesssary.
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