“ That an element so common with us here should also be abundant in these awfully distant regions of the universe is one of the most astonishing facts that modern science has revealed.
As the eye follows these ramifications of the Great Nebula, ever fading away in brightness until it dissolves in the blackness of the sky; as we look at the multitudes of bright stars which sparkle out from the depths of the great glowing gas; as we ponder on the marvelous outlines of a portion of the nebula, we are tempted to ask what the true magnitude of this object must really be. ”

“ The sun itself is only a spark, which seems lost amid the eighteen millions of stars which Herschel’s telescope discerned in the Milky Way; the latter, an immense agglomeration of suns and planets, which looks to us like a broad streak of light round the whole universe, is in reality nothing but a nebula. Beyond our own sky, other skies stretch far away into infinity, and others beyond these, so that light notwithstanding its prodigious rapidity, takes eternities to cross them. How small the earth seems in this fathomless abyss of stars! ”

“ If care be taken to choose as a standpoint for observation an open place, such as a plain or the summit of a hill on land, or, again, the open sea, and if the atmosphere, somewhat charged with dew, possesses all its transparency and purity, we shall see thousands of luminous points twinkling in all directions, accomplishing slowly and together their silent march. The contrast of the obscurity which reigns on the surface of the earth with the brightness of that resplendent vault gives an indefinite depth to the celestial ocean that deepens over our heads. ”

“ It is marvelous that we can perceive the stars at such a distance. What an admirable transparency in these immense spaces to permit the light to pass, without being wasted, to thousands of billions of [72] miles! Around us, in the thick air which envelops us, the mountains are already darkened and difficult to see at seventy miles; the least fog hides from us objects on the horizon. What must be the tenuity, the rarefaction, the extreme transparency of the ethereal medium which fills the celestial spaces!
Let us suppose ourselves, then, on the sun nearest to ours. ”

“ All this time the news was swiftly traveling earthward, traveling on and on and on, two hundred thousand miles every second of the clock, past star and nebula and system, never halting, never faltering—yet it took hundreds of years to come to us; and beyond us lie countless worlds that will not see the new star for centuries to come. Hundreds of years hence in their sky will appear suddenly in the constellation of Perseus a strange star; it will increase in brightness for a few days just as it did in ours; it will fade away intermittently just as it did in ours. ”

“ We already know that the sky is not a concave sphere on which brilliant nails could be attached; that it is not a species of vault; that an immense infinite void envelops the earth on all sides, in all directions. We know also that the stars, the suns of space, are scattered at all distances in the vast immensity. When, therefore, we remark in the sky several stars near each other, that does not imply that these stars form the same constellation, that they are on the same plane, and at an equal distance from the earth. ”

“ A star of this magnitude might, however, be easily detected by an observer who is familiar with the principal stars of a constellation.
The Milky Way may, perhaps, be better seen with the naked eye than with any instrument, although an opera-glass brings out well, in some places, its more delicate details. A mere passing glance might lead a casual observer to suppose that the Galaxy stretched as a band of nearly uniform brightness across the heavens. ”

“ These astonishing changes have been confirmed at the two great American observatories, the Yerkes and the Lick.
Whence and how had destruction come upon this particular star? At one hour the star is dark, cold, solid. A few hours later this dark, solid, cold body is a blazing world, its solid mass blown apparently into countless fragments; from every fragment, big or little, there pour streams of fiery vapor; for millions of miles round the star there is a whirlpool of fire, a tempest of flame; and from end to end of this great universe of ours the brightness of the burning star pulsates. ”

“ What are the stars? This is a question that a child will ask, and I have heard of a child’s pretty idea that the stars were little holes in the sky to let the glory of heaven shine through. The philosopher will replace this explanation by another hardly less poetical, which will enable us to form some more adequate notion of the real magnificence of the universe. Each star that we see is, it is true, only a glittering little point of light, but that is merely because we are a long way from it. ”

“ How, then, can we hope to appreciate the vastness of space whereof astronomy tells us? To the student of science attempting to conceive the immensities of whose existence he is assured, the same lesson might be taught in parable which the child of St. Augustine’s vision taught the Numidian theologian. As reasonably might an infant hope to pour the waters of ocean into a hollow, scooped with his tiny fingers in the sand, as man to picture in his narrow mind the length and breadth and depth of the abysses of space in which our earth is lost. ”

“ We could not find any just reason for believing that in Jupiter or Mars there exist the elements with which we are acquainted, when we found that even the central orb of the planetary system exhibits no such feature of resemblance to the earth. But now that we know, quite certainly, that the familiar elements, iron, sodium, and calcium, exist in the sun’s substance, while we are led to believe, with almost perfect assurance, that all the elements we are acquainted with also exist there, we see at once that, in all probability, the other planets are constituted in the same way. ”

“ It is hardly going too far to say that our powers of actual conception are limited to the extent of space over which the eye seems to range in the daytime. Of course, in the daytime, at least in clear weather, there is one direction in which the eyesight ranges over a distance of many millions of miles—namely, where we see the sun. But the sense of sight is not cognizant of that enormous distance, and simply presents the sun to us as a bright disk in the sky, or perhaps rather nearer to us than the sky. Even the distance of the sky itself is underestimated. ”

“ Imagine yourself a spectator, standing immovable in space. A luminous body appears in the distance, little by little you see it approach and increase in size; its immense circumference, which exceeds a hundred thousand leagues, is in rapid rotation, which makes each point on its periphery travel through nine miles a second. The globe itself passes before you, carried through space with a velocity twenty-four times greater than that of a cannon-ball. In such a way Jupiter would appear to you traveling in its orbit. ”

“ Such a catastrophe is quite possible in a universe like ours, where stars [234] and worlds, millions and millions in number, sweep down the great avenues of space with a velocity far beyond our comprehension.
We take it that when the crack of doom comes to this earth of ours it will be in this fashion. Some great dark star will strike our sun fair and square, and then in the twinkling of an eye, before the inhabitants of earth know what has taken place, sun and moon and planet will be wrapped up and dissolved in an atmosphere of fire. ”

“ The glory of a meteor is often so evanescent that we just get a glimpse and it is gone. The sky resumes its ordinary aspect; the familiar stars are there, and even the very situation of the brilliant streak has become unrecognizable. But this is not always so; it sometimes happens that the brief career of the meteor leaves a notable trace behind it, so that for seconds and for minutes the sky is diversified by an unwonted spectacle. The path of the meteor leaves a stain of pearly light on the sky to mark the highway pursued by our celestial visitor. ”

“ The sun himself, with all his immense system, has sunk in the infinite night. On the wings of inter-sidereal comets we have taken our flight toward the stars, the suns of space. Have we exactly measured, have we worthily realized the road passed over by our thoughts? ”

“ We can not indeed assert that they are all so great as our sun, but we can affirm with certainty that many of them are far greater and far more splendid. Considering that our sun presides over a system of worlds of which the earth is one, that it gives light and heat to those worlds, and guides them in their movements, it would greatly enlarge our conceptions of the universe if we were assured that there was even one more sun as large and as splendidly attended as is our own. ”

“ Figure in your mind’s eye each one of those stars in the likeness of a majestic sun, as big, warm, and bright as our sun, and look at other parts of the sky and repeat the process with the other constellations, and your conception of the magnificence of the starry system will begin to assume proper proportions. ”

“ The inhabitants of Venus see us shining in their sky like a magnificent star of the first magnitude, soaring in the zodiac, and showing motions similar to those which the planet Mars presents to us; but instead of showing a reddish brightness, the earth shines in the sky as a bluish light. ”

“ THE PLANET VENUS.—Camille Flammarion Revolving round the sun in 224 days, Venus has its motion combined with ours in such a manner that it passes its inferior conjunction, between the sun and us, every 584 days; but the plane in which it revolves is inclined 3° 23′ to that in which the earth itself moves. When Venus attains its greatest elongations from the sun it shines in the west in the evening, then in the morning in the east, with a splendid brightness which eclipses that of all the stars. It is, without comparison, the most magnificent star of our sky. ”

“ THE GREAT NEBULA OF ORION.—Sir Robert S. Ball The telescope, ever an ally in the study of the heavens, is in this part of the science absolutely indispensable. In other branches of astronomy we can learn something without its aid. Indeed, many great astronomical discoveries were made long before the telescope was invented. But ere this memorable event in the history of science it was impossible for us to know anything of the existence of the nebulæ. It is indeed true that there is one of these objects which can be just detected by the naked eye. ”

“ In discussing the extent of the visible universe, it must always be borne in mind that the further a source of light is from us the fainter is the illumination which we receive from it. Suppose that a star which just lies on the limits of naked-eye visibility were somehow to be transported to a distance which is twice as great, then the lustre of that star would be diminished to one-fourth of its original amount. It would, therefore, be of course invisible to the unaided eye, but could still be easily perceived by a telescope. ”

“ The brilliant planet Venus can hardly be mistaken when seen in the morning or evening sky. When at its brightest it considerably exceeds Jupiter and Mars, and far surpasses Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens.
If a very bright planet is seen rising at sunset, it can not be Venus, which is never seen beyond a limited distance from the sun. The observer may, therefore, conclude with certainty that the planet is either Jupiter or Mars. The latter, which occasionally rivals Jupiter in brilliancy, may be easily distinguished from the “giant planet” by its distinctly reddish color. ”

“ If we thus approach each star we find a sun, while all the other suns of space are reduced to the rank of stars. Strange reality!—the normal state of the universe is night. What we call day only exists for us because we are near a star.
The immense distance which isolates us from all the stars reduces them to the state of motionless lights apparently fixed on the vault of the firmament. All human eyes, since humanity freed its wings from the animal chrysalis, all minds since the minds have been, have contemplated these distant stars lost in the ethereal depths ”

“ In the pure sky scarcely veiled by it, the sun, diminished to less than half his size at our horizons, probably exhibits his coronal streamers and prominences as a regular part of his noontide glory; atmospheric circulation proceeds so tranquilly as not to trouble the repose of a land “in which it seemeth always afternoon”; no cyclones traverse its surface, only mild trade-winds flow toward the equator, to supply for the volumes of air gently lifted by the power of the sun, to carry reinforcements of water-vapor north and south. ”