Admiral Smyth has well said, "It checks one's pride to recollect that if our sun with the whole system of planets, asteroids, and moons, and comets were to be removed from the spectator to the distance of the nearest fixed star, not one of them would be visible, except the sun, which would then appear but as a star of perhaps the 2nd magnitude. Nay, more, were the whole system of which our globe forms an insignificant member, with its central luminary, suddenly annihilated, no effect would be produced on those unconnected and remote bodies; and the only annunciation of such a catastrophe in the Sidereal "Times" would be that a small star once seen in a distant quarter of the sky had ceased to shine."[289] Prof. George C. Comstock finds that the average parallax of 67 selected stars ranging in brightness between the 9th and the 12th magnitude, is of the value of 0"·0051.[290] This gives a distance representing a journey for light of about 639 years! Mr. Henry Norris Russell thinks that nearly all the bright stars in the constellation of Orion are practically at the same distance from the earth. His reasons for this opinion are: (1) the stars are similar in their spectra and proper motions, (2) their proper motions are small, which suggests a small parallax, and therefore a great distance from the earth. Mr. Russell thinks that the average parallax of these stars may perhaps be 0"·005, which gives a distance of about 650 "light years."[291] According to Sir Norman Lockyer's classification of the stars, the order of _increasing_ temperature is represented by the following, beginning with those in the earliest stage of stellar evolution:--Nebulæ, Antares, Aldebaran, Polaris, α Cygni, Rigel, ε Tauri, β Crucis. Then we have the hottest stars represented by ε Puppis, γ Argus, and Alnitam (ε Orionis). _Decreasing_ temperature is represented by (in order), Achernar, Algol, Markab, Sirius, Procyon, Arcturus, 19 Piscium, and the "Dark Stars."[292] But other astronomers do not agree with this classification. Antares and Aldebaran are by some authorities considered to be _cooling_ suns.