But if all the stars are moving, what of our sun? Our sun is a star. And our sun also is moving. He is pressing onward, in a wide sweep through space, bearing along with him his whole vast family--planets, satellites, comets, meteorites--round or towards some far distant center. For aught we know, every star in the heavens may have a like family traveling with him. In infinite space the stars are strewn in immense clusters, like archipelagoes of islands in the ocean of the heavens. To go from one star to another in the same archipelago light takes years; to pass from one archipelago to another it takes thousands of years. Each of these stars is a sun similar to ours, surrounded, doubtless, at least for the most part, by worlds gravitating in its light; each of these planets possesses, sooner or later, a natural history adapted to its constitution, and serves for many ages as the abode of a multitude of living beings of different species. Attempt to count the number of stars which people the universe, the number of living beings who are born and die in all these worlds, the pleasures and pains, the smiles and tears, the virtues and vices! Imagination, stop thy flight! The sun is not one of the most quickly-moving stars. His rate of speed has not been found out with any certainty, but it is believed to be about four or five miles a second. And where are we going? This has been in part discovered. If you and I were driving through a forest of trees, we should see the trees on each side of us seeming to move backward, while behind they would close together, and in front they would open out. Astronomers--and first among them, William Herschel--reasoned that if our Solar System were really in motion, we ought to be able to see these changes among the stars. And some such changes have become visible through careful watching--not so much those ahead and behind as those at the sides. It is not actually so simple a matter as looking at the trees in a forest, because the trees would be at rest, whereas each star has his own particular real motion, as well as his seeming change of place caused by our sun’s motion. It is more like moving in a small steamer at sea, among hundreds of other craft, each of which is going on its own way, at the same time that all on either side seem to move backward because we are moving forward. So each movement had to be noted, and the real motions had to be separated from the seeming backward drift of stars to the right and left of the sun’s pathway. The result of all this is that the sun, with his planets, is found to be hastening towards a certain far-off constellation named Hercules.