Dr. Harlow Shapley, Paine professor of practical astronomy, and director of the Harvard College Observatory, received yesterday the gold medal of the London Royal Astronomical Society for his studies of the galaxy. England has no higher honor for astronomers than this reward which Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and Dr. Albert Einstein have won in the past.

The medal includes the privilege to deliver a lecture in May at the presentation in Burlington House and an appointment to the George Darwin lectureship.

Dr. Shapley has advanced the idea that the sun, moon, and other planets all came to life at once from an eddy swirling in the gas that was the parent of the "Milky Way." According to that thesis, the whole solar system is made up of fragments of the gas-like matter ejected from that huge shining mass of material which later was condensed into those countless stars we view as our "Milky Way." This, for Dr. Shapley, is just one of a series of similar galaxies in space and is of no particular importance.

He has also presented evidence that the universe is older than scientists have before calculated from studying the heavens as well as the huge star clouds or nebulae which are supposed to exist far out in space. His proof of this is that there have been discovered particles of solid matter, or "cosmic meteors," which are moving through space at high speed. They are far out of the paths of the meteors that are visible from the earth.