The dazzling Sirius reigns 92,000,000,000,000 kilometers (57,000,000,000,000 miles), the pale Vega at 204,000,000,000,000. Each of these magnificent stars must be a huge sun to burn at such a distance with such luminosity. Some are millions of times larger than the Earth. Most of them are more voluminous than our Sun. On all sides they scintillate at inaccessible distances, and their light strays a long while in space before it encounters the Earth. The luminous ray that we receive to-day from some pale star hardly perceptible to our eyes--so enormous is its distance--may perhaps bring us the last emanation of a sun that expired thousands of years ago. * * * * * If these methods have been clear to my readers, they may also be interested perhaps in knowing the means employed in weighing the worlds. The process is as simple and as clear as those of which we have been speaking. _Weighing the stars!_ Such a pretension seems Utopian, and one asks oneself curiously what sort of balance the astronomers must have adopted in order to calculate the weight of Sun, Moon, planets or stars. Here, figures replace weights. Ladies proverbially dislike figures: yet it would be easier for some society dame to weigh the Sun at the point of her pen, by writing down a few columns of figures with a little care, than to weigh a 12 kilogram case of fruit, or a dress-basket of 35 kilos, by direct methods. Weighing the Sun is an amusement like any other, and a change of occupation. If the Moon were not attracted by the Earth, she would glide through the Heavens along an indefinite straight line, escaping at the tangent. But in virtue of the attraction that governs the movements of all the Heavenly bodies, our satellite at a distance of 60 times the terrestrial half-diameter revolves round us in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11-1/2 seconds, continually leaving the straight line to approach the Earth, and describing an almost circular orbit in space. If at any moment we trace an arc of the lunar orbit, and if a tangent is taken to this arc, the deviation from the straight line caused by the attraction of our planet is found to be 1-1/3 millimeter per second. This is the quantity by which the Moon drops toward us in each second, during which she accomplishes 1,017 meters of her orbit. On the other hand, no body can fall unless it be attracted, drawn by another body of a more powerful mass. Beings, animals, objects, adhere to the soil, and weigh upon the Earth, because they are constantly attracted to it by an irresistible force. Weight and universal attraction are one and the same force. On the other hand, it can be determined that if an object is left to itself upon the surface of the Earth, it drops 4.90 meters during the first second of its fall.