96 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



clusters, but that there are doubles and triples and double clusters, too, 

 among them as well as among the stars, their relatives. 



Those which the little earth thus intercepts can, however, be both a 

 small portion of the whole. All the other planets must receive their share, 

 and the sun himself yet more. Perhaps almost all that are by the plan- 

 ets (which deflect without catching them) imprisoned within the solar 

 system, must ultimately fall into the sun, as a boat is swallowed by a 

 whirlpool. Those, however, which with a high initial velocity come into 

 the sun's range and are not deflected by some planet, can have no resting 

 place among our family of worlds. Like wandering Jews they can have 

 no home, but must travel without ceasing. Whirling around or past the 

 sun, they must move on and ever on, with retarded speed, in dim star- 

 Hght and inconceivable cold, until they feel the incipient influence of 

 another stellar mass. Then, like a canoe above Niagara, their rate of 

 motion will increase, at first imperceptibly, but there can be no drawing 

 back. Feeling the throb of a Jiew life they must again be hurried on, and so 

 thread their way from one star's vicinity to another, adding perhaps a 

 nodule here or some dust elsewhere. Time fades into nothingness on 

 such journeys. Light, at 187,000 miles a second, takes years to travel 

 from star to star, and almost an infinity must be consumed by the meteors, 

 much of whose swiftness is lost in the struggle to get away from this to 

 other systems. Perchance, however, some of them may grow, increasing 

 until they have mass enough to crush all their particles within themselves 

 into coherence, when they would melt with the fervent heat evolved, and 

 at some such stage become self-luminous and join the celestial family as 

 stars, as some of the new splendours yet Ijing in the womb of Cosmos. 



It is perhaps much to build so lofty a theory on a statistical table, 

 which is as imperfect as the Carlisle tables of mortality, and, like them, 

 needs to be extended over many j-ears in many countries. Yet these 

 figures lead directly to the inference, which is in line with other reason- 

 ings and observations, that aerolites are evenly distribvxted throughout 

 space, that they move at various angles with the jDlane of the ecliptic, 

 that the universe is a. plenum, in which change and therefore growth and 

 dissolution must be going on. And this, while adding another proof of 

 the universality and unity of Law, does allow some privileges to one who 

 is tempted to gild the hai'd prose of fact with the poetry of imagination. 



