THE VISIBLE CEEA.TION. 177 



inadequate. Even liglit, (which could we thus curb its motion would 

 girdle the earth in a twinkling,) which rebounds to us from the moon 

 in a second and a quarter, and which, springing from its home in the 

 sun, visits the most distant of the known planets and returns in 

 less than a day, even this swiftly flying messenger, borne upon the 

 very wings of the morning, can only reach us from those remote 

 bounds after the lapse of centuries. Admitting all this to be true, 

 then, although an accurate result is here no longer possible, there is 

 a reasonable probability that the sublime idea presented by Huygens 

 is itself a fact; that some of these bodies are so remote that the light 

 by which we see them must have left them before the creation of man. 

 There is something almost awful in the thought of our having arrived 

 at a reasonable probability that we see these objects as they were be- 

 fore the race of man had being ; to behold, as it were, the record of 

 eternity past, unrolled to be read in time. We are compelled to view 

 them from such a distance looking towards them; but in imagination 

 we may place ourselves at the other extremity of the line thus defined, 

 then the light from the earth and solar system would have been as 

 long in reaching that position as the light from the other way has been 

 in reaching us ; and if we had the optical power and could look down 

 upon the earthy then the mastodon, which is now a mere fossil in our 

 cabinets, would be seen as the living, moving^ breathing mastodon. 

 The I'act, in more general terms, is this: There are portions of the uni- 

 verse through which the visible record of very much that is great 

 and awful that has been transacted here is still travelling through the 

 regions of space^ and might be discerned by a being provided with 

 sufficient optical power. I think it necessary to notice but one thing 

 more. The fixed stars are not merely like the sun in the intensity of 

 their light, but, it would also seem, in revolving around their axes. 

 We ascertain that the sun revolves around its axis by noticing the 

 spots on its surface. When there are many spots towards us the light 

 of the sun must be enfeebled, sometimes even sensibly so. There are 

 variable stars that periodically become dim and then again resume 

 their former brightness. The natural solution of this fact is that these 

 stars are like the sun, not merely in their light, but also in the way in 

 which that light is produced. Perhaps upon their surface there are 

 spots which, when turned towards us, cause their light to become dim, 

 and when away from us there is an increase of brightness. There are 

 stars also which may be called temporary stars ; for after appearing 

 in the heavens a brief period they become seemingly very small or they 

 disappear altogether, a fact which can hardly well be accounted for, 

 except by the supposition that there has been a real physical change 

 in the body itself. In undergoing these changes, changes in color have 

 also been manifest, so great that we may suppose that there has been 

 a combustion or partial destruction of the body in question. The star 

 seen by Anshelm in 1670 was of the third magnitude, passed through 

 great fluctuations of light for two years, and then became either ex- 

 cessively small or quite invisible. There are, moreover, lost stars, 

 whose places are now vacant, though some cf them have been recently 

 observed. When we look at these strange fluctuations we may sup- 

 pose that something like combustion has taken place^ or that, for the 



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