This little argument will prepare us for an explanation of the stars. They merely appear to us to be points of light of varying degrees of brightness, but we have seen that our own sun might be reduced in lustre to that of the very dimmest of the stars if only it were removed sufficiently far. If, therefore, the stars are at a great enough distance from our system, it may indeed be that they also are suns, possibly equaling, or possibly even surpassing, our own sun in magnificence. Here is indeed an imposing suggestion. Can it be that the host of stars which adorn our midnight sky are actually suns themselves of an importance comparable with that of our own? This is a great thought, and we desire to test it by every means in our power. You will see from the reasoning I have given that the whole question turns simply on one point, and that is: How far off are the stars? The tiniest point of light that is just seen as a glimmer in the mightiest of telescopes may be indeed a sun as great, or indeed a million times greater, than our sun, if only that star be sufficiently far off. To find the distance of a star is a problem which taxes the utmost powers of the painstaking astronomer; every refinement of skill in making his measurements and of care in the calculation of his observations have to be lavished on the operation. Alas! it but too often happens that the astronomer’s labors prove to be futile. The surveying navigator often has to mark on his chart that no bottom could be found in the depths of the sea. His appliances would not work, or work reliably, in those ocean abysses; so, too, the astronomer, when he tries to sound the depths of space to the distances of the stars, has also to mark, generally speaking, “No bottom here,” as the result of most of his investigations. When this is the case we know for certain that the star on which his calculations have been made must be a gorgeous sun, because we are assured of the greatness of its distance, even though we have not been able to find out what that distance was. There are, however, some few places through the sky where the astronomer’s sounding line can, so to speak, touch bottom; there are a few stars of which we do know the distance, and the result is not a little significant. Were our sun to be withdrawn from us to a distance so great as that of the very nearest of the stars, our magnificent ruler and benefactor would certainly have lost all his splendor; he would, in fact, have shrunk to the similitude of a little star not nearly so bright as many of those which we see over our heads every night. Imagine the sun’s light subdivided into two hundred thousand parts, each of which would give us only a feeble illumination, and then imagine that each of these parts was again divided into two hundred thousand parts more, and it is one of these last fragments that would represent the miserable lustre which the sun would then display.