A NEGLECTED SCIENCE

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 12 May 1913, Page 3

A NEGLECTED SCIENCE

Tha wi'ii -spread ignorance of elementary about the stars is deplored by Miss Mary E. Byi'd in an article in "Popular Astronomy" an American publication. "Nature Study" is taught in the schools, so far as it. relates to forms of plant and animal life, and to the surface features of the earth, hut as for the heavenly bodies, declares Miss Byrd, generations of children grow up knowing less about tihe stars than the negroes in Central Africa. Educated people are frequently to be met wi LT who cannot tell a planet from a star or whether the new 'noon is rising or setting. Few realise that tho sun crosses the sky in a different path on each suceoedisg day, and fewer still connect these changes, which are continually going oil before their eyes, with the change of the seasons. In fact, the writer asserts, it would be difficult to ask five questions about the heavenly bodies so simple that two or throe out of a. company generally well-informed, could get 50 per- ce>nfy of marks.' In advocating j as a remedy for this ignorance the introduction of astronomical instruction into schools as a regular tiling. Miss Byrd combats one or two popular j notions about the science which she holds to be fallacious. One is the idea that astronomy and a teles<sffpe are inseparable. The human eye alone is no menu astronomical instrument. It achieved much before the invention of the telescope, and it also giv.es a grasp of the whole subjeet, showing the relation and connection of different parte, and'thus serving to lay the broad foundations for the . study of the heavens. In any case, whether astronomy is specially tang' in the schools or not, there is vctv j little excuse, considering the f:>y' ties for the cheap acquisition of scientific knowledge now-a-days, for anyone who holds himself educated knowing: nothing about +he stars wlrr are nightly spread before bis gaze.