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: JANUARY, 1804. I TRUST, that you will not be discouraged by one or two hard words, derived from the languages of those nations, which have cultivated astronomy with great success. I shall make use of as few as possible; for in this and every other science I should be glad if every word was familiar to the English ear. I will suppose you then on an eminence at noon, your prospect being bounded by a line, where the Heavens and the Earth seem to meet each other. This line is called the horizon, or bounder, because it bounds our prospect. The rising and setting Suns form always a beautiful object on this line; and in this situation they present to a young person a good opportunity of correcting his first ideas, and shewing him, that the Sun is a much greater body than it appears to be. For, if the Sun sets behind a tree of some magnitude, and at a distance from the observer, he will perceive, that the tree doesnot appear so high as the distance between the upper and B 2 .' lower rim of the Sun, and he must then be satisfied, that the Son is greater than the tree. Farther experience will teach him, how inadequate the idea is, that be can form of the Sun, either by the eyesight, or any assistance yet afforded to it by human ingenuity. But I supposed you to be on an eminence at noon. In this country the Sun is never directly over your head; if he were, we should say, that he was in the zenith, meaning by the word zenith the point directly over your head. To look at the Sun, your face at noon must always be in this country in the same direction; and it is not difficult to conceive a line drawn from the point directly over your head through the Sun, and continued till it meets the horizon. The point where this line cuts the horizon is called the south point; and the line, drawn...