HELTER-SKELTER FLIGHT OF THE STARS 321 



satellite, as our earth is a minor satellite to the sun. Our little 

 system, this microcosm, may be the type, the image of the 

 macrocosm ; or, more simply, we may quite leave on one side 

 any question of system or solar orbits. If we conceive the 

 stars, these other suns, in motion, why regard our own as fixed ? 

 It may be moving too not perhaps in an orbit, but yet some 

 whither. 



It is hard most times to track out the history of an idea ; 

 that of a translatory motion of our system in space can hardly 

 have been very remote, at least as a scientific inference. Exist 

 it might in the teeming imaginations of Bruno or Democritus ; 

 it could be but a guess. It might readily have reached its first 

 distinct presentation in the mind of the man who had discovered 

 the periodical aberration of the stars, and therewith made clear 

 the almost fathomless distances at which they must lie. It 

 is to Bradley, in fact, that Humboldt accredits it. In the work 

 in which Bradley announced his second discovery, that on 

 nutation (1748); there is a remarkable passage : 



" For if our own solar system be conceived to change its 

 place with respect to absolute space, this might, in process of 

 time, occasion an apparent change in the angular distances 

 of the fixed stars ; and in such a case, the places of the nearest 

 stars being more affected than of those that are very remote, 

 their relative positions might seem to alter, though the stars 

 themselves were really immovable. And on the other hand, 

 if our own system be at rest, and any of the stars really in motion, 

 this might likewise vary their apparent positions, and the more 

 so the nearer they are to us, or the swifter their motions are, 

 or the more proper the direction of the motion is, to be rendered 

 perceptible by us. Since, then, the relative places of the stars 

 may be changed from such a variety of causes, considering the 

 amazing distance at which it is certain some of them are placed, 

 it may require the observations of many ages to determine 

 the laws of the apparent changes even of a single star ; much 

 more difficult, therefore, it must be to settle the laws relating 

 to all the most remarkable stars." 



But " the many ages " of observation were not needed. 

 Time was going more swiftly now. It was scarce forty years, 

 and not long after Bradley 's death, before his ideas were put 



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