or the stone in the sling. It has no axis and no axial rotation.
The modern astronomers, detected in pretenses to knowledge they
never possessed, let themselves down easy.

This "discovery," of no axial rotation by the interior planets,
made by Schiaparelli and confirmed by Flammarion in 1894, has
since been fully verified by our Western astronomers. All the
new astronomies accept it. But the admission of astronomical
"error," to speak politely, comes too late for the student it
turned back from his study of Eastern physics. He cannot regain
his lost faith and lost ground.

Thirty years ago Proctor made it clear to Western students that
the orbit of the moon was a cycloidal curve (a drawn-out spring)
around the sun, the earth's orbit being coincident with its axis;
and that the moon was, astronomically and correctly, a satellite
of the sun, not a satellite of the earth. This has been the
Eastern view and teaching from time immemorial.

The Eastern distinction between father Sun and mother Moon, and
the classification of the latter as a planet, did not disturb the
Western student. He understood that. It was the "absolute
accuracy" of modern astronomers in regard to the length of the
day on Mercury or Venus, which the astronomers declared had
been corrected down to the fraction of a second, that made it
impossible for him to accept the Eastern physics when the latter
squarely contradicted his own.

This was but the first of many similar stumbling-blocks in the
path of the student of Eastern physics.