From these considerations we can enunciate the magnificent truth which astronomy discloses to us. I do not think that in the whole range of nature there is any thought so magnificent or so imposing as that which teaches us to regard every star of every constellation as a sun. We can not indeed assert that they are all so great as our sun, but we can affirm with certainty that many of them are far greater and far more splendid. Considering that our sun presides over a system of worlds of which the earth is one, that it gives light and heat to those worlds, and guides them in their movements, it would greatly enlarge our conceptions of the universe if we were assured that there was even one more sun as large and as splendidly attended as is our own. But now we find that not only is there one additional sun, but that they teem in uncounted thousands through space. Look, for example, on the next fine night at the Great Bear, the best known of all our northern constellations, and there you see seven stars forming the well-known feature. Figure in your mind’s eye each one of those stars in the likeness of a majestic sun, as big, warm, and bright as our sun, and look at other parts of the sky and repeat the process with the other constellations, and your conception of the magnificence of the starry system will begin to assume proper proportions. But this is only the first step, you must next look at the smaller stars, and reflect that they, too, are also suns, only much further off as a general rule than the brighter stars, though this is by no means invariably the case. Thus your estimate of the number of suns in the universe will rise to thousands, but you will not stop there, you will get a telescope to help you, and, to your extreme delight and wonder, you will find that there are hosts of stars—too faint to be visible to the eye, but which the telescope will immediately disclose. You will get a more powerful instrument, and then you will perceive that the stars are to be numbered by tens of thousands, and even by millions, and with every fresh accession of power in your telescope fresh troops and myriads of suns are revealed. Suns in clusters, suns strewn thickly here and sparsely there, so as to give us the notion that the only limit to the number we can see is the power of the telescopes we are using. Attempts at actual numeration are futile, for who can tell the number of the stars? We can, however, form an estimate, and by taking samples, so to speak, of the sky here and other samples there, we have been enabled to learn the overwhelming fact that our universe does contain at the very least one hundred millions of suns.