modern research makes it more like half a second.[29] Soon afterwards, Struve announced a quarter of a second as the parallax of Vega, but that is distinctly too great; and Henderson announced for [alpha] Centauri (then thought to be a double) a parallax of one second, which, if correct, would make it quite the nearest of all the stars, but the result is now believed to be about twice too big. Knowing the distance of 61 Cygni, we can at once tell its real rate of travel--at least, its rate across our line of sight: it is rather over three million miles a day. Now just consider the smallness of the half second of arc, thus triumphantly though only approximately measured. It is the angle subtended by twenty-six feet at a distance of 2,000 miles. If a telescope planted at New York could be directed to a house in England, and be then turned so as to set its cross-wire first on one end of an ordinary room and then on the other end of the same room, it would have turned through half a second, the angle of greatest stellar parallax. Or, putting it another way. If the star were as near us as New York is, the sun, on the same scale, would be nine paces off. As twenty-six feet is to the distance of New York, so is ninety-two million miles to the distance of the nearest fixed star. Suppose you could arrange some sort of telegraphic vehicle able to carry you from here to New York in the tenth part of a second--_i.e._ in the time required to drop two inches--such a vehicle would carry you to the moon in twelve seconds, to the sun in an hour and a quarter. Travelling thus continually, in twenty-four hours you would leave the last member of the solar system behind you, and begin your plunge into the depths of space. How long would it be before you encountered another object? A month, should you guess? Twenty years you must journey with that prodigious speed before you reach the nearest star, and then another twenty years before you reach another. At these awful distances from one another the stars are scattered in space, and were they not brilliantly self-luminous and glowing like our sun, they would be hopelessly invisible.