easily conceive that, beyond the space
accessible to our eyes or our instruments, there
exists space a hundred times, a thousand
million times larger than it,—than the finite
space which our finite organs and instruments
are able to fathom. When once the mind
has thus far climbed these lofty heights, whose
utmost summit is inaccessible to human
understanding,—these elevated regions, which
are really the mountain-peaks of truth,—it
falls wonder-stricken and prostrate before the
measureless power of Him who planned the
Universe, wherein, boundless as it is, perfect
order reigns from a past eternity to an
eternity to come.

Nothing, or next to nothing, is known of
the physical constitution of the stars. There
are stars which shine with white, bluish,
yellowish, and reddish light respectively;
there are single stars, like our sun; and
there are stars which go in pairs, and in
threes, revolving round each other, or rather
round their common centre of gravity: it is
as if the earth and the moon were more
nearly equal to each other in size, and shone
with their own instead of with borrowed
light.

Astronomers have succeeded, by ingenious
means, of whose correctness there is no
reason to doubt, in determining the distance
of the nearest stars. The only way in which
we can approach to a conception of that vast
distance is by making use of the rate at which
light is transmitted for the measurement of
the interval between us and them. Now, light
travels one hundred and ninety-two thousand
miles in a second of time, and it takes the
nearest star more than six years and a half
to send us its light; in other words, supposing
that the star were utterly annihilated, we
should continue to see it for more than six
years and a half after it had disappeared
from its place in the heavens. This distance,
reduced arithmetically to miles, becomes a
range of figures too long to make any clear
impression on the mind, so completely does it
overstep our habitual range of numeration.
Well, Herschell believes that certain nebulæ
must have taken as much as two million
years to transmit us their feeble and cloudy
light, so that what we see of them is probably
their past history rather than their
present state. And now an astounding, extreme
idea, which stretches our thoughts in another
direction—namely, that of infinite littleness,
Monsieur F. Moigno (and others with him)
surmises that, however great may be the
density of either solid or fluid bodies, their
ultimate and elementary atoms are as widely
separated from each other, relatively to their
size, as are the heavenly bodies in open
space.

In our flight through the starry firmament,
it is natural that we should hover, in fond
contemplation, over our own home and
birthplace, our solar system, our habitation,—
earth and her sister planets. There they
circle beneath us, shining orbs, all wheeling
in one direction, though of various magnitude
and brightness, around their lordly master,
the sun. Seen from the height at which we
soar, allowing a complete view at once of the
central star and the planets in their orbits, the
Sun looks like a globe of fire some six and twenty
inches in diameter; Mercury, his nearest
attendant, is of the modest size of a grain of
millet; next comes Venus, the size of a pea;
the earth is a little larger pea; Mars is a
good-sized, nay, a large pin's head. The
telescopic planets produce a dazzling effect, like
motes of dust dancing in the sunshine; they
amount to, at least, some fifty or sixty small
grains of sand, Jupiter beams like a fine
bright orange, while Saturn rivals the
magnitude of a billiard-ball. Uranus resembles a
phosphorescent cherry; Neptune might be
taken for a still more faintly luminous plum.
The apparent distance between these revolving
orbs may be measured by scores and
hundreds of yards; while the constellations
of fixed stars are outlying in space at such,
extreme distances, that no change in their
aspect, no alteration in the perspective of
their groups, is perceptible to an ordinary
observer, if we flit from the planetary pea to
the orange, or from the orange to the plum.
In companionship with most of these, are
satellites or moons, whose dimensions are as
variable as those of the planets themselves,
though we know of no moon so small as
many of the telescopic planets. Thus, Titan,
Saturn's sixth satellite in point of distance,
discovered by Huygens, is much more bulky
than Mercury, and only a trifle smaller than
Mars.

Let us cautiously (for fear of burning our
wings) approach the common centre and parent
of our own planetary family; for the latest
system of cosmogony makes him, materially,
the father of us all. From his substance are
believed to have been born, at the will of the
Great Artificer, planets, and from them their
satellites; from the sun, too, comets and
aërolites. As we draw near to the mighty
luminary, we perceive black, angular,
irregular spots, surrounded by a penumbra or
half-obscure fringe with radiating puckers,
like those of a muslin frill. They contract
and expand, opening and closing like the
thunderclouds observed in a stormy sky. Did
we dare to venture nearer, we should find
that these luminous and flickering stripes are
the crests of immense waves of flame, or
incandescent gas, agitated by the heavings and
tossings to and fro of the solar atmosphere.
But the portion of the sun's disc which is
exempt from spots is far from shining with
uniform brilliancy. The ground of its pattern
—to borrow a homely phrase—is thinly
overspread with a multitude of little black spots
or spores, which are in a state of continual
change, as if curdled matter, or some chemical
precipitate, were rising and sinking in a
transparent fluid. We can almost see that an