This table presents the most trustworthy data which we have yet obtained with reference to stellar distances. As a great number of attempts have been made on stars which, by their brightness or by the magnitude of their proper motion, would appear to be the nearest to us, we may believe that the star now considered as the nearest is really so, and that there is no other less distant. Thus our sun, a star in the immensity, is isolated in infinitude, and _the nearest_ sun reigns at twenty-five trillions of miles from our terrestrial abode. Notwithstanding its unimaginable velocity of 186,400 miles a second, light moves, flies, during four years and one hundred and twenty-eight days to come from this sun to us. Sound would take more than three millions of years to cross the same abyss. At the constant velocity of thirty-seven miles an hour, _an express train starting from the sun Alpha Centauri would not arrive here till after an uninterrupted course of nearly seventy-five millions of years_. Here, then, are the nearest suns to us. These stars, twenty-three in number, are almost the only ones which have shown a perceptible parallax; still the result is very doubtful for the last four, of which the parallax is less than a tenth of a second. Attempts have been made to ascertain the parallax of all the stars of the first magnitude, and the result has been negative for those which are not entered in this list. Canopus, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Achernar, Alpha of the Cross, Antares, Spica, and Fomalhaut, do not show a perceptible parallax. The fine star Alpha Cygni, which shines near 61 Cygni, does not present to the most accurate researches any trace of fluctuation: it is, then, incomparably more distant than its modest neighbor--at least five times, and perhaps twenty times, fifty times, one hundred times beyond that. What must be the colossal size and amazing light of these suns, of which the distance is greater than three hundred to four hundred trillions of miles, and which nevertheless still shine with so splendid a brightness! We did not know the distance of any stars till the year 1840. This shows how recent this discovery is; indeed, we have hardly now begun to form an approximate idea of the real distances which separate the stars from each other. The parallax of 61 Cygni, the first which was known, was determined by Bessel, and resulted from observations made at Königsberg from 1837 to 1840. Since then, the first figure obtained has been corrected by a series of more recent observations.