distance than we can determine by our actual knowledge. Sirius may also be a sun much larger and more powerful than ours; and if that is the case, it must throw the borders of his domain so much the further back by approaching them to us, and at the same time retrench the circumference of the sun. I cannot avoid presuming, that in this great number of fixed stars, which are all so many suns, there are some greater and others smaller than ours; others more or less luminous, some nearer, which are represented to us by those stars called by astronomers, _stars of the first magnitude_, and many others more remote, which for that reason appear to us smaller. The stars called _nebulous_ seem to want light and fire, and to be only half lighted; those which appear and disappear alternately are, perhaps, of a form flattened by the violence of the centrifugal force in their motion of rotation, and are perceiveable only when they are in the full, disappearing when they are sideways. In this grand order of things, and in the nature of the stars, there are the same varieties, and the same differences, in number, size, space, motion, form, and duration; the same relation, the same degrees, and the same connection, as are found in all the other orders of the creation. Each of the suns being endowed like ours, and like all matter, with an attractive power, which extends to an indefinite distance, and decreases, as the space increases, analogy leads us to imagine that within each of their spheres there exists a great number of opaque bodies, planets, or comets, which circulate round them, but which being much smaller than the suns which serve them for heat, they are beyond the reach of our sight.