How To Know Everything!

Ever since I was a little boy, if I wanted my imagination informed, I would go find this book:

It is the 1914 edition of Our Wonder World. Although I have never read the text, I found it full of great, scientifically accurate pictures. I still have it, and when I want to know stuff I just look at the pictures and imagine what they're about. For instance, when I need to know anything about the solar system, I consult this illustration captioned, "Off for the planets!":

As you can see, in 1914, space travel was not conducted with rockets, capsules, robot explorers or telemetric probes. It was conducted by crop duster. Carburetors were choked to run rich, pilots took a deep breath and held it, then flew out of Earth's atmosphere to solve interplanetary enigmas. One of the questions they solved was the difference between a solstice and an equinox.

As you can see from this detail of the illustration, there were two people in the crop duster:

One, of course was the pilot. The other was either a naturalist or naturist --no way to tell because everybody bundles up in outer space-- whose task it was to determine what extraterrestrial life-forms eat. Because he found no creatures in the void, he decided they were either omnivores (which eat anything when they can get it --and there wasn't anything) or carnivores (they eat only carnival  food --candied apples, peanuts and such-- when the circus is in town, which it wasn't). But let's return to the enigma they did solve.

Solstice is taken from the Latin "Sol", meaning Sun, and "sistere", meaning to stand still. It means the day is much longer than the night because the sun seems to get stuck --except in countries closer to the North Pole where the sun just flies around in a circle and is still thought to be a comet. For Equinox, I had to consult a more modern authority, Norma, who said "Equus means horse. So equinox is when we all turn into horses?"

I disagreed: " Silly idea. You're neglecting "nox", obviously from the Latin "noxa", meaning toxic or dangerous."

"So," she said. "Twice a year we turn into very unpleasant horses."

I closed and reshelved Our Wonder World, satisfied the time to read its text has not yet come.