But let us return from so fruitless an inquiry. There is another idea suggested by the contemplation of the heavens of no less interest, although presenting a very different, if not an opposite aspect. It is the comparative NOTHINGNESS of the tangible material universe, as contrasted with the space, or spaces, occupied even within its visible boundaries. The distance of our sun from the nearest fixed star (conjectured by astronomers to be the star 61 Cygni) is estimated at being at least 60,000,000,000,000 of miles, or 600,000 diameters of the earth’s orbit, or about sixty million diameters of the sun himself. Taking this for the average distance between the stars, although it is doubtless much greater, and supposing them to be equal in magnitude to each other, and to the sun, we have these most striking results. The sun and the star in Cygnus (and so of the others) would present the same relation as that of two balls of ten inches diameter placed ten thousand miles apart, or one a thousand miles above the North Pole, and the other a like distance below the South Pole of our earth. Preserving the same ratio, we might represent them again, by two half-inch bullets placed, the one at Chicago, and the other on the top of the City Hall in the City of New York; and so on, until finally we would come down to two points, less than a thousandth part of an inch in diameter, requiring the microscope to render them visible, and situated at the distance of a mile asunder. Suppose then an inch of the finest thread of thistle-down cut into a thousand sections, and a globular space as large as the sphere of our earth, occupied with such invisible specks, at distances from each other never less than a mile at least, and we have a fair representation of the visible universe—on a reduced scale, it is true, yet still preserving all the relative magnitudes, and all the adjusted proportions of the parts to each other, and to the whole. On any scale we may assume, all that partakes, in the lowest degree, of sensible materiality, bears but an infinitessimal proportion to what _appears_ to be but vacant space. In this view of the matter it becomes more than a probability that there is no relatively denser solidity than this any where existing. Even in the hardest and apparently most impenetrable matter, the ultimate particles may be as sparse in their relative positions, as are, to each other, the higher compound and component bodies which we know are dispersed at such immense distances as mere points in space.