[Illustration: FIG. 26.--Occultation of the Pleiades by the Moon.] Photography here discovers to us, not 6, 9, 12, 15, or 20 stars, but hundreds and millions. These are the most brilliant flowers of the celestial garden. [Illustration: FIG. 27.--Stellar dial of the double star [gamma] of the Virgin.] We, alas, can but glance at them rapidly. In contemplating them we are transported into immensities both of space and time, for the stellar periods measured by these distant universes often overpower in their magnitude the rapid years in which our terrestrial days are estimated. For instance, one of the double stars we spoke of above, [gamma] of the Virgin, sees its two components, translucent diamonds, revolve around their common center of gravity, in one hundred and eighty years. How many events took place in France, let us say, in a single year of this star!--The Regency, Louis XV, Louis XVI, the Revolution, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Louis Philippe, the Second Republic, Napoleon III, the Franco-German War, the Third Republic.... What revolutions here, during a single year of this radiant pair! (Fig. 27.) But the pageant of the Heavens is too vast, too overwhelming. We must end our survey. Our Milky Way, with its millions of stars, represents for us only a portion of the Creation. The illimitable abysses of Infinitude are peopled by other universes as vast, as imposing, as our own, which are renewed in all directions through the depths of Space to endless distance. Where is our little Earth? Where our Solar System? We are fain to fold our wings, and return from the Immense and Infinite to our floating island. CHAPTER IV OUR STAR THE SUN In the incessant agitation of daily life in which we are involved by the thousand superfluous wants of modern "civilization," one is prone to assume that existence is complete only when it reckons to the good an incalculable number of petty incidents, each more insignificant than the last. Why lose time in thinking or dreaming? We must live at fever heat, must agitate, and be infatuated for inanities, must create imaginary desires and torments. The thoughtful mind, prone to contemplation and admiration of the beauties of Nature, is ill at ease in this perpetual vortex that swallows everything--satisfaction, in a life that one has not time to relish; love of the beautiful, that one views with indifference; it is a whirlpool that perpetually hides Truth from us, forgotten forever at the bottom of her well.