Children and Stars

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 18, 1906

Children and Stars

Nature study, which has been transformed in a majority of cases into nature recreation, has extended to a great variety of subjects, but has treated one important branch with curious neglect.

Birds and butterflies, trees, flowers, mushrooms, ferns, and shells have their enthusiastic admirers everywhere; but a question as to the summer constellations, or the planets which are the morning and evening stars of the month, reveals the fact that nineteen persons out of twenty can barely recognize the Milky Way and the Great Dipper. Yet what a door here stands open to the thoughtful mind!

Night after night, over city roofs, the great procession passes; one need go but to the street or the window to watch. What child who has been taken out into the whispering darkness of a summer night or the splendid silver beauty of a winter evening for a star talk has ever forgotten it? The names may slip away, perhaps, but something—a sense of beauty, of mystery, of the unspeakable wonder of the universe—remains unforgettably.

There have been children with other star memories. One of the prettiest pictures in biography is that of Lyman Beecher’s children watching for the end of the long Puritan Sabbath and the release from constraint “when three stars came out.” What friendly aspect the early stars must have worn to them all their lives, with the memory of their playtime signal!

Nathaniel Bowditch, the mathematician, had other devices. His son says that the father’s reward for good behavior was to draw one of the constellations, in dots of ink, upon the child’s hand. Happy children, so to learn the stars in shining hours! Happy stars to be so linked with radiant memories!

Doubtless the stars may be learned from books or named from a professor’s chair, but the parent who teaches his boy or girl even a little of the beauty and the glory of the heavens—who puts the sky into his childhood—gives him a memory beyond all price.—Youth’s Companion.