Are we in any danger? No, because, however madly they may come, whether ten, twenty, or one hundred miles per second, so many millions of years must elapse before they reach us that we need give ourselves no concern in the matter. Probably none of them are coming straight to us; their course deviates just a hair's-breadth from our system, but that hair's-breadth is so large a quantity that when the millions of years elapse their course will lie on one side or the other of our system and they will do no harm to our planet; just as a bullet fired at an insect a mile away would be nearly sure to miss it in one direction or the other. Our instrument makers have constructed telescopes more and more powerful, and with these the whole number of stars visible is carried up into the millions, say perhaps to fifty or one hundred millions. For aught we know every one of those stars may have planets like our own circling round it, and these planets may be inhabited by beings equal to ourselves. To suppose that our globe is the only one thus inhabited is something so unlikely that no one could expect it. It would be very nice to know something about the people who may inhabit these bodies, but we must await our translation to another sphere before we can know anything on the subject. Meanwhile, we have gained what is of more value than gold or silver; we have learned that creation transcends all our conceptions, and our ideas of its Author are enlarged accordingly. XV AN ASTRONOMICAL FRIENDSHIP There are few men with whom I would like so well to have a quiet talk as with Father Hell. I have known more important and more interesting men, but none whose acquaintance has afforded me a serener satisfaction, or imbued me with an ampler measure of a feeling that I am candid enough to call self-complacency. The ties that bind us are peculiar. When I call him my friend, I do not mean that we ever hobnobbed together. But if we are in sympathy, what matters it that he was dead long before I was born, that he lived in one century and I in another? Such differences of generation count for little in the brotherhood of astronomy, the work of whose members so extends through all time that one might well forget that he belongs to one century or to another.