TIME, SPACE, AND INVISIBLE WORLDS. 285 



terrestrial time within the insignificant limit of six thousand years, 

 so have discoveries in Astronomy overleaped those boundaries of 

 space arbitrarily imposed by appearances and ignorance, which in 

 present as well as in former ages have sought to make Earth the 

 centre of the Universe, and to cabin and confine all Creation 

 within the microscopic limits of a few thousand miles. With the 

 advent of the telescope in 1609, when planetary discs, revolving 

 satellites, and sphericity of Sun and Moon were first demonstrated 

 to human sense by Galileo, there gradually dawned upon thinking 

 minds the conviction that other globes and other worlds might 

 exist, in which life in its thousand forms, such as we here see 

 around us, might exist and flourish ; and in which beings like our- 

 selves, enjoying the liberty which accompanies responsibility, are 

 working out their own destinies. The wide welcome everywhere 

 and at all times accorded to this suggestion of life in other Planets, 

 and in which we recognise the ever-enlarging social instinct of human- 

 ity, strongly suggests its naturalness, and therefore to some extent 

 its likelihood. We are thus led to indulge the thought, and to 

 anticipate the possibility, however seemingly remote or improbable, 

 of communicating with kindred minds and hearts, upon one or 

 other of those Planets which adorn our midnight skies. Proctor 

 believed that it is in this aspect that astronomy acquires what 

 powerful hold it possesses upon the popular mind. 



During the five thousand years in which Astronomers were 

 pondering and questioning in vain the distance and constitution 

 of the Stars, and when at length their powers of belief were 

 strained, as the piling up went on of the big distance figures, the 

 Astronomical mind was unconsciously all this time being inducted 

 into one of the mysteries of the Infinite. Compelled by the logic 

 of exact measurements, the Astronomer rose to the occasion, and 

 strove to grasp the pregnant truth that our Sun, vast in bulk 

 (860,000 miles diamater) as he is, is yet, with all its planetary and 

 other attendants, utterly lost, and sinks into insignificance, amid 

 that mighty host of Suns and Systems which micrometer and 

 spectroscope reveal as in swift and ceaseless motion through the 

 vast abysses of space. Human sight, thus multiplied by the 

 telescope a thousandfold, transporting us instantaneously into 

 recesses of space, so remote that light from thence requires four 



