Now, try to imagine a child on earth with an arm long enough to reach the sun. His fingers might be scorched by the raging fires there, while yet his brain on earth would remain quite unaware of the fact for about one hundred and thirty years. All through those years, sensation would be darting along the arm exactly as fast as it darts from the finger-tips of an ordinary child on earth to that child’s brain. If the scorching began before he was one year old, he would have become a very aged man, one hundred and thirty years old, before he could know in his mind what was happening in the region of his hand. Moreover, if, on receiving the intimation, he should decide to withdraw his hand from that unpleasantly-hot neighborhood, another hundred and thirty years would elapse before the fingers could receive and act upon the message, telegraphed from the brain, through the nerves of the arm. So much for the distance of the sun from our earth! But the stars! How far off are the stars? The distance of the moon is a mere nothing. The distances of the planets have been found out. The distance of the sun has been measured. But the stars--those wondrous points of light, twinkling on, night after night, century after century, unchanged in position save by the seeming nightly pilgrimage of them all across the sky in company, caused only by our earth’s restless, continual whirl,-- What about the distances of the stars? Can we measure their distance by means of their parallax? This mode of measurement was tried successfully on the moon, on the planets, and on the sun. But when it was tried upon the stars, from two stations as far apart as any two stations on earth could be, the attempt was a failure. Not a ghost of parallax could be detected with any one star. Not the faintest sign of displacement was seen in the position of a single star when most critically and carefully examined. Then arose a brilliant thought! What of earth’s yearly journey round the sun? If a base-line of 8,000 miles were not enough, compared with the great distance of the stars, this at least remained. Our earth at midsummer is somewhere about 185,000,000 miles away from where she is at midwinter, comparing her position with that of the sun, and reckoning him to be at rest. In reality, the sun is not at rest, but is in ceaseless motion, carrying with him, wherever he goes, the whole Solar System with as much ease as a train carries its passengers. Those passengers are truly in motion, yet, with regard merely to the train, they are at rest. So each member of the Solar System--attached to the sun, not by Ptolemaic bars, but by the bond of gravity--is borne along by him through space; yet, with respect to each member of that system, the central sun is always and absolutely at rest.