While visiting Henry Ward Beecher one day, Robert Ingersoll noticed a beautiful globe depicting the various constellations and stars of the heavens. Ingersoll asked his host who had made it. "Who made it?" Beecher replied, seizing the opportunity to attack his guest's well-known agnosticism. "Why, nobody made it. It just happened."

[Because he felt it was blasphemous to name constellations after characters from Greek mythology, the German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-1625) introduced a new system in which the northern constellations were named after New Testament characters and the southern constellations after Old Testament characters. Needless to say, the scheme did not catch on.]