In five days and some hours the star would cover the 92 million miles which separate us from the Sun, a distance which a gunshot would take seven years to cover. It is clear that such a speed is marvellous, yet it exists, and has been measured by delicate and precise operations. It cannot in any case be less than the figure we have indicated. * * * * * This speed is a symbol, and it is as such that I wish to present it here. All the stars are endowed with such movements more or less rapid, and not only all the stars--each of them a sun and most of them the centres of planetary systems, dispensers of light, heat, and harmony, around which gravitate habitable earths, the present, past, or future abodes of various beings and terrestrial things--not only, I say, are all the stars thus driven through the void, but all the planets, all the satellites, all the worlds and systems, all creation. The Earth swings round the Sun carried along with a speed of 1,600,000 miles per day, meanwhile rotating on its axis, animated by a dozen different sorts of movements, lighter and more mobile than a child’s balloon floating in the air, solicited by the attractions of various neighbouring bodies, a veritable plaything of cosmic forces which carry us along in an immense whirlpool. The Moon revolves round the Earth, constantly deranging us in our progress and subjecting us to perpetual undulations. The Sun carries us along with all its cortège towards the constellation Hercules, so that since its very origin our Earth has never passed through the same place twice, but describes in space, not closed ellipses, but spirals which roll on without end. The suns adjoining ours move with their systems in various directions. The constellations are dislocated from one century to another, each star being animated by a proper movement which produces a constant modification of the figures in the sky. In addition to all this, our whole sidereal system is carried along in space by a joint movement. And thus everything moves, everything circulates, everything rushes, with breathless speed, towards a goal which is unknown and which is never reached.