Such are the immensities of star-strewn space! The journey of a comet receding from the sun with inconceivable velocity during hundreds of thousands of years carries it but so small a distance from him compared with the distance of the nearest star as scarcely to change the appearance of the celestial landscape; and yet the distances separating the sun from the nearest of his fellow suns are but as hair-breadths to leagues when compared with the proportions of the scheme of suns to which he belongs. These distances, though so mighty that by comparison with them the inconceivable dimensions of our own earth sink into utter nothingness, do not bring us even to the threshold of the outermost court of that region of space to which the scrutiny of our telescopes extends. Yet the whole of that region is but an atom in the infinity of space. FOOTNOTES: [1] It might be suggested that the appearance of this blazing comet among the stars drove the more superstitious of the Israelites at that time to the worship of star-gods, as we read how, during the judgeship of Jair, they "served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord and served not Him." To a people like the Jews, who seem to have been in continual danger of returning to the Sabaistic worship of their Chaldean ancestors, the appearance of a blazing comet may have been a frequent occasion of backsliding. [Illustration] III. _OF THE INFINITELY MINUTE._ When I speak of the infinitely minute, I use the word infinitely not in its absolute sense, but relatively. Actual infinity of minuteness is as utterly beyond our conceptions as actual infinity of vastness. But we may speak of what is very much less than the least object of which our senses can make us directly conscious as _for us_ infinitely minute. Among the greatest wonders science has to deal with are those relating to bodies and movements thus beyond the direct ken of our senses. There is a universe within the universe which our senses reveal to us,--a universe whose structure is so fine that the minutest particle which the microscope can reveal to us is, by comparison, like one of the suns which people our universe compared with the unseen particles constituting matter.