CHAPTER VI

THE PLANETARY SPHERES

‘ And after shewed hym the nyne sphcrisAnd after that the melodye herd he,

That cometh of tkilke speris thries thre ;

That welleys of musyke ben and melodye

In this world here a?id cause of armonye. ’ —CHAUCER .

T HE number seven is written on the sky. Whattime the seven planets were counted and indi-vidualised is beyond all history; probably not two ina hundred even now guess at any other planet thanVenus ; probably not two in a thousand have everseen Mercury, certainly not without a telescope; yetall of them we find distinguished by names andgrouped together as errant bodies among the fixedstars in the earliest traditions :—(i) The Sun, (2) theMoon , (3) Mars , (4) Mercury, (5) Jupiter, (6) Venus ,(7) Saturn.

The first known and named probably of all constel-lations, the Great Bear, always visible above thehorizon, ‘ never bathing in ocean,’ as Homer has it, isa group of seven. The lesser Bear has the sameform, which is repeated a third time by the greatsquare of Pegasus, and the three bright stars inAndromeda and Perseus . Seven also are the sym-metrical and splendid stars of Orion. In France ,the Pleiades are still called the ‘ seven stars,’ and the

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