Thought travels fast--faster than a comet, faster than light. A rushing comet would, it is believed, take twenty millions of years to cross the chasm between the nearest known fixed star and us. Light, flashing along at the rate of about one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, will perform the same journey in four years and a third. But thought can overleap the boundary in less than a single moment. Each star that we see in the heavens is to our eyesight simply one point of light. The brighter stars are said to be of greater magnitude, and the fainter stars of lesser magnitude; yet, one and all, they have no apparent size. The most powerful telescope, though it can increase their brilliancy, can not add to their size. A planet, which to the naked eye may look like a star, will, under a telescope, show a disk, the breadth of which can be measured or divided; but no star has any real, visible disk in the most powerful telescope yet constructed. The reason of this is the enormous distance of the stars. Far off as many of the planets lie, yet the farthest of them is as a member of our household compared with the nearest star. I have already tried to make clear the fact of their vast distance. Light, which comes to us from the sun in eight minutes and a half, takes over four and a third years to reach us from Alpha Centauri. From this four-years-and-a-third length of journey between Alpha Centauri and earth, the numbers rise rapidly to twenty years, fifty years, seventy years, even hundreds of years. The distance of most of the stars is completely beyond our power to measure. The whole orbit of our earth, nay, the whole wide orbit of the far-off Neptune, would dwindle down to one single point, if seen from the greater number of the stars. It used to be believed that, taking the stars generally, there was probably no very marked difference in their size, their kind, their brightness. Some of course would be rather larger, and others rather smaller; still it was supposed that they might be roughly classed as formed much on the same scale and the same plan. But doubts are now felt about this notion. For a very similar idea used to be held with regard to the Solar System. The wonderful variety of form and richness in numbers, now known to abound within its limits, are discoveries of late years. May not the same variety in kind and size be found also among the stars? The more we look into the heavens, the more we find that dull, blank uniformity is not to be seen there. It is the same upon earth. Man builds his little rows of boxlike houses side by side, each one exactly like all the rest, or dresses his thousand soldiers in coats of the same cut and color, or repeats a neat leaf-design hundreds of times on carpets or wall-papers; but God never makes two leafs or two blades of grass alike. Wholesale turning out of things after one pattern is quite a human idea, not divine.