Star-land Author:Robert Stawell Ball Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE INNER PLANETS. Mercury, Venus, and Mars How to make a Drawing of our System The Planet MercuryThe Planet Venus The Transit of Venus... more » Venus as a World The Planet Mars and his Movements The Ellipse The Discoveries made by Tycho and Kepler The Discoveries made by Newton The Geography of Mars The Satellites of Mars How the Telescope aids in Viewing Faint Objects The - Asteroids, or Small Planets. MERCURY, VENUS, AND MARS. We can hardly think of either the sun or the moon as a world in the sense in which our earth is a world, but there are some bodies called planets which seem more like worlds, and it is about them that we are now going to talk. Besides our Earth there are seven planets of considerable size, and a whole host of insignificant little ones. These planets are like ours in a good many respects. One of them, Venus, is about the same size as this earth; but the two others, Mercury and Mars, are very much smaller. There are also some planets very much larger than any of these, namely, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. We shall in this lecture chiefly discuss three bodies, namely, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, which, with the earth, form the group of "inner" planets. The planets are all members of the great family dependent on the sun. Venus and the earth may be considered the pair of twins, alike in size and weight. MOVING CELESTIAL BODIES. 135 Mercury and Mars are the babies of the system. The big brothers are Jupiter and Saturn. All the planets revolve round the sun, and derive their light and their heat from his beams. We should like to get a little closer to some of our fellow-planets and learn their actual geography. Unfortunately, even under the most favorable circumstances, they are a very long way off. Th...« less