320 THE WORLD MACHINE 



of the stars themselves. What many another astronomer, 

 seeking as ardently as he, had failed to find, he made clear. 

 Outside of any effect due to the refraction of the earth's atmos- 

 phere, to the motion of the earth about the sun, to the aberra- 

 tion of light, to the nodding of the earth's axis, he reveals, 

 proves, that the stars move. Not to him will it be given to 

 find their parallax, to compute their actual distance ; that must 

 be the work of instruments yet more delicate than any he can 

 contrive. But their relative motion at least he can disclose. 



It is no revolving heaven that he finds, no fixed order ; it 

 seems all a random, mindless, helter-skelter flight. A swarm 

 of bees, a cloud of fire-flies, reveals as little purpose. Some- 

 times it seems that there are real clusters ; almost all of the 

 Pleiades appear to move in a common direction so do five of 

 the seven stars of the Dipper. But, for the most part, it is 

 chaotic enough ; side by side, one star is falling ever downwards, 

 another rushing toward the zenith, two others speeding away 

 in opposite level flight for the poles of the universe. Some may 

 be describing orbits ; it seems fairly certain that others are 

 not. Some are flashing across the abyss of space at such tre- 

 mendous speed that the combined mass of a hundred million 

 suns could not hold them in leash. 



Picturing it all, it seems like nothing so much as a wild dance, 

 a mad Sir Roger de Coverley of suns, in a line that knows no 

 end. Even now the mind cannot grasp it ; a poet perhaps, 

 not we of common clay ! Yet, could our human kind wake 

 to the full consciousness, the true significance, of this weird and 

 seeming insensate riot of the stars, should it be happier, stronger, 

 then than now ? 



"All a wonder and a wild surprise." And still, amid the 

 confused movement of the heavens, there did seem, slowly 

 emergent, one general fact. From it Herschel rises to that 

 discovery of his which for us was of largest import. 



Of course, if sun and planets are swung free in space, an 

 apparent motion of the stars may be illusory ; it might be due 

 to our own motion instead. It might be the case of the Hippar- 

 chan-Ptolemaic and the Aristarchan-Coppernican conceptions 

 over again. Just as our earth turns about the sun, so our sun 

 may be circling some central luminary lost for us in the depths 

 of space, compared with which our sun may be but a minor 



