THE MEASURE OF STELLAR SPACES 339 



their supposed distance. Consider that the parallax is known 

 of sixty stars out of perhaps a hundred million revealed by the 

 photographic plates. Consider that merely a beginning has 

 been made, and it is easy to see that any endeavour to fix an 

 upper limit is simply absurd. It is conceivable that gigantic 

 suns may exist, compared with which even huge Canopus would 

 seem a pigmy, and compared with which our solar deity would 

 be as insignificant as one of the five hundred asteroids which 

 circle out beyond the path of Mars, to us. There may be not 

 merely one, there may be many. 



We have no distinction as to vastness, we have none of little- 

 ness, even. Just as it is clear that there are suns hundreds, 

 perhaps millions of times the bulk of our sun, so it appears 

 that there are others, probably, beside which we might seem 

 very huge and very important. The universe, then, is not made 

 up of units of a regular pattern, of much the same grandeur ; 

 there is no evidence of set design, no evidence of the existence 

 of a mould for suns and worlds. The stars differ among them- 

 selves in size as much, perhaps, as the components of our solar 

 system, the individual planets and their satellites, even, differ 

 among themselves. 



The moral is not distant ; it is not flattering. What is 

 demonstrated beyond a doubt is that in the firmament of stars 

 our solar system is of no especial consequence. It is not unique, 

 it is one of hundreds of millions. It is not enormously vast ; 

 it is merely mediocre. It seems to have absolutely nothing 

 about it that is distinctive. It is one of a crowd, a mob, a 

 multitude, an infinite swarm. This is the social, the moral, the 

 anthropological lesson of the measures of stellar distance. 



If you wish to picture it, you may conceive it in the simile 

 already adduced, that of one of a cloud of dancing fire-flies 

 a cloud hundreds of miles in extent. If it will be a better help 

 to the mind, we may think of a huge mountain, streaming with 

 millions and billions of ants. One of these ants, one of these 

 fire-flies, would be our sun. It is in some such way, perhaps, 

 that we may estimate the importance, not of the little life of 

 man, not of the minor planet that we call the earth ; but of 

 the whole solar system and all that it contains. 



The stars move ; that Herschel had made clear. Like the 



