If our entire solar system were wiped out of being, there would be left no noticeable void among the countless systems of worlds and suns and stars; in the immensity of space the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth. There are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling around them in the illimitable fields of space. Those stars which we erroneously call "fixed" stars are the centers of other systems vastly greater, vastly grander than the one of which our earth forms so insignificant a part. Of course to us numbers of them appear, even when viewed through the most powerful telescopes, only as mere luminous points, but that is owing to the immensity of distance between them and ourselves. But the number that is visible to us even with instrumental assistance can have no comparison with the number that we cannot see; there is no limit to that number; away in what to us may be called the background of space are millions, billions, uncountable myriads of invisible suns regulating and illuminating countless systems of invisible worlds. And beyond those invisible suns and worlds is a region which thought cannot measure and numbers cannot span. The finite mind of man becomes dazed, dumbfounded in contemplation of magnitude so great and distance so amazing. We stand not bewildered but lost before the problem of interstellar space. Its length, breadth, height and circumference are illimitable, boundless; the great eternal cosmos without beginning and without end. In order to get some idea of the vastness of interstellar space we may consider a few distances within the limits of human conception. We know that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, yet it requires light over four years to reach us from the nearest of the fixed stars, travelling at this almost inconceivable rate, and so far away are some that their light travelling at the same rate from the dawn of creation has never reached us yet or never will until our little globule of matter disintegrates and its particles, its molecules and corpuscles, float away in the boundless ether to amalgamate with the matter of other flying worlds and suns and stars.