Those brilliant points are all suns like the one which forms the center of our system, and around which our earth revolves; yet so inconceivably remote, that, although moving through space with an incredible velocity, they have not materially changed their relative position since recorded observations began. Compared with their distance, the distance of our own sun--92,000,000 miles--seems as nothing; yet how inconceivable even that distance is when we endeavor to mete it out with our terrestrial standards! For if, when Copernicus--the great father of modern astronomy--died, in 1543, just at the close of the Protestant Reformation, a messenger had started for the sun, and traveled ever since with the velocity of a railroad train--thirty miles an hour--he would not yet have reached his destination! Evidently, then, no standards, which, like our ordinary measures, bear a simple or at least a conceivable relation to the dimensions of our own bodies, can help us to stretch a line in such a universe. We must seek for some magnitude which is commensurate with these immensities of space; and, in the wonderfully rapid motion of light, astronomy furnishes us with a suitable standard. By the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites the astronomers have determined that this mysterious effluence reaches us from the sun in eight minutes and a half, and therefore must travel through space with the incredible velocity--shall I dare to name it?--of 186,000 miles in a second of time! Yet, inconceivably rapid as this motion is, capable of girdling the earth nearly eight times in a single second, the very nearest of the fixed stars, [alpha] Centauri, is so remote that the light by which it will be seen in the southern heavens to-night, near that magnificent constellation, the Southern Cross, must have started on its journey three years and a half ago. But this light comes from merely the threshold of the stellar universe; and the telescope reveals to us stars so distant that, had they been blotted out of existence when history began, the tidings of the event could not yet have reached the earth!