Without losing myself in the profundity of infinite perspectives, I concentrated my thought as I had already concentrated my gaze upon this simple seventh-magnitude star of the constellation of the Great Bear, which never descends below the horizon of Paris, so that we can observe it almost any night in the year, and I remembered that it shines 200 billion miles from here--a distance which an express train rushing along at 75 miles an hour would take no less than 325 million years to traverse. * * * * * Transported to such a distance, the glorious sun which illuminates us would lose its splendour and its glory. Not only would it be invisible to the naked eye, not only would it fail to contribute to the brightness of the midnight sky, but it would fall considerably below the star of the seventh magnitude above mentioned and would only be discoverable by the most careful telescopic search. That small star, therefore, which is only a small brilliant point in the starry heavens, is in reality an immense sun of giant size, greatly in excess of that on which our planet depends for its light. The latter is already 333,000 times heavier than the Earth and 1,300,000 times more bulky. In claiming for that small star a weight more than a million times that of our globe and a volume equalling that of several million Earths we should be well within the region of possibility. * * * * * These views in connection with a simple star almost forgotten among the multitude of its sisters bring us face to face with the most formidable realities of the constitution of the universe. But they do not yet represent the most interesting aspect of our contemplation. It is a singular fact, quite unexpected by the ancient philosophers, fantastic and hardly conceivable to the seeker after truth who endeavours to comprehend its real value: It is that these suns of the infinite, far from being fixed as they seem to be on account of their immense distance, are travelling through space with tremendous speed. The star in question[2] runs, flies, hurls itself across the immensity with a speed of about 20 million miles per day! There are no fixed stars. Yes, 6,800 million miles per annum! And yet, in ten years, in fifty years, in one hundred years, this star will be barely displaced in the sky! The speed of a bullet or a shell fired by one of our most powerful guns being only 2,340 feet per second and that of this star being a million feet per second, we see that the speed of the star surpasses that of the shell in the proportion of 457 to 1! Can the most daring imagination picture such a flight!