In the matter of the stars themselves, we must carry our illustration further. Come with me up to the top of that lofty hill on the border of the sea, and let us look from the cliff. We see still the movements among boats and smacks, yachts and steamers, only the increased distance makes the movements seem slower. But our view is widened. Look on the far horizon and see three distant dots, which we know to be ships--one and two close together, and a third a little way off, making a small constellation of vessels. Watch them steadily for a quarter of an hour. You will detect no movement, no increased distance or nearness between any two of the three. The group remains unchanged. Are they really moving? Of course they are, more or less rapidly, probably with differing speed and in different directions. But at so great a distance, one quarter of an hour is not long enough for their motions to become visible to the naked eye. If we could watch longer--say, for two or three hours--ah, that would make all the difference! If only we could watch longer! But the hundreds, and even thousands of years during which men have watched the stars, sink, at our vast distance, into no more than one quarter of an hour spent in watching the far-off ships from the high hilltop. The motions can not be detected. In ten thousand years you might see something. In fifty thousand years you might see much. But four or five thousand years are not sufficient. One other mode there is, by means of which the movements of the ships on the horizon might be made plain. Suppose you had no more than the quarter of an hour to spare, but suppose you had at your command a powerful telescope. Then you may practically bring the ships nearer, and by magnifying the small, slow, distant motions, you may make them, as it were, larger, quicker, more easy to see. Telescopes will do this for us, likewise, in the matter of the stars. By means of telescopes, with the assistance of careful watching and of close calculation it has been found that the stars are really moving quickly, each one in his own pathway. The very speed of some of them has been measured. Arcturus is one of those stars, the motions of which are most plainly to be seen. In the course of about one thousand years he changes visibly his place in the sky by a space equal to the apparent diameter of the moon. The seeming movement of Arcturus in one thousand years is the same as the seeming width of the round moon that we see. But the actual speed with which Arcturus rushes through space is said to be no less than fifty-four miles each second, or not far from two hundred thousand miles an hour. That is nearly three times as fast as our own earth’s motion round the sun. How enormous the distance must be which can shrink such speed to such seeming slowness!