system for the sense of honour, of duty, of justice, and of personal conscience; and this is often forgotten by modern educators who have suppressed everything without putting anything in its place. Let us have no sectaries of any kind! Humanity grows up. We are no longer children. At the distance from the Earth which suggested such reflections, the distance of the planet Neptune, the farthest limit of the solar system known at present to astronomy, our judgment on the works of man is quite different from that which satisfied us before we left our country. We contemplate the solar system in all its grandeur, we recognise the smallness of our own little planet compared with the vast space in which it moves, and the short time of its revolution round the Sun, and we feel that our ordinary terrestrial estimates have hitherto been based upon those narrow and limited sentiments circumscribed by the horizon of the church tower. We free ourselves from them and find ourselves in a position to judge the immensity of creation with greater liberty, independence, and integrity. But far as Neptune is from our terrestrial home, it still forms, like ourselves, part of the solar family. Other planets still unknown to terrestrial astronomy gravitate beyond Neptune, the first of them probably at a distance 48 times as great as the distance between the Earth and the Sun, that is to say, at 7,500 million miles, in an immense orbit which it takes at least 330 years to accomplish. The celestial voyage which I have begun takes me beyond the outermost regions of the solar system. Flinging myself into the infinite heavens, I arrived at another system by penetrating into the cosmic domain of a star. (5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES Every star is a sun shining by its own light. The Sun which illuminates us has 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth and weighs 333,000 times as much. The dimensions and the masses of the stars are of the same order. A large number of them are much more voluminous and their masses are still more considerable. Whatever star we approach, we find in it a sun like a blinding furnace. These innumerable centres of light, heat, electricity, and gravitational attraction only appear to us as small luminous points on account of the immense abysses which separate us from them. The nearest sun, our nearest star in space, burns at 276,000 times the distance which separates us from the Sun, i.e. 25 billion miles from here. Travelling with the speed of an express train flung into space at 40 miles an hour towards the nearest star without any stoppage or any slowing down, we should not arrive at our destination until after an uninterrupted flight of 75 million years. Travelling with the speed of the swiftest projectile which the most ingenious man-killers have yet constructed, a speed which we can reckon as double that of sound, or 2,200 feet per second, we should yet require a million and a half years to cover that distance.