Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/369

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A CAPTIVE COMET.
353

It is now perfectly well known to every schoolboy that the sun is the center and ruler of the solar system; that the earth and other planets revolve about it in great ellipses. This simple fact

New and Old Orbits of Comet V, 1889.

was not recognized, however, until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century. For thousands of years previously, astronomers as well as priests, the educated and the ignorant, had thought vol. xlii.—24