EVIDENCE PROVING THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 13 



extinct volcanoes, with the sunlight giving the shadows 

 as on our earth. An illustration helps us, but it is not 

 equal, and cannot be equal, to seeing the object itself. 



As the moon looks to the naked eye, so do the 

 planets, the wandering stars, look when examined by 

 the telescope. Our sun appears as a glowing mass of 

 matter, each molecule of which it consists being in 

 motion, a mean of ninety -two millions of miles, or 

 thereabouts, away from us, a distance the mind cannot 

 grasp. Yet it is so large that the very spots, huge 

 craters in the moving, glowing mass, are often large 

 enough to allow an object the size of our earth to pass 

 in with a margin of thousands of miles clear on every 

 side. 



Vast glowing orb, probably the source of all terres- 

 trial life and movement, what is thy function in the 

 great infinity of suns masses of molecules ? 



Thus, in brief, we obtain the first fundamental idea ; 

 such a one, when fully grasped, is probably retained 

 for all time. 



like one hundred million luminous stars in the sky; when we 

 remember that every one of these is the indication of a wholly 

 exceptional incident in the career of the body from which the light 

 emanates ; and when we further believe, as believe we mast, that for 

 each one star which we can thus see there must be a stupendous 

 number of invisible masses, then, indeed, we begin to get some 

 notion of the extraordinary multitude in which material orbs are 

 strewn through space. The theory of probabilities declares to us with 

 a certainty, hardly, in my opinion, inferior to that of optical demon- 

 stration, that even within the distance which can be penetrated by 

 our telescopes the visible stars cannot form the hundredth, probably 

 not the thousandth, perhaps not the millionth part of the total 

 quantity of matter." (" In the High Heavens," Sir Robert Ball, 

 D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S., 1894, p. 246.) 



