396 THE WORLD MACHINE 



regions less remote. It may be that with this steady advance 

 the nearer of the stars will be found aggregated into systems 

 as orderly and as simple as that of our planetary arrangement. 

 It may be that from this we shall attain to some more or less 

 definite conceptions of the rest. They would never be more 

 than the fancies of Lambert inferences from analogy. 



Of more proximate interest is the question as to whether 

 our own sun is a member of any immediate system of stars. 

 Already there is a slight suggestion that it may be. A very 

 ambitious attempt at an orderly arrangement of the nearer 

 stars was made some years ago by Maxwell Hall. 



His reasoning was simple. If the sun is revolving about 

 any central point, it is obvious that this point will be more or 

 less at right angles to the line of its present motion. From the 

 known proper motions of the nearer stars, Hall endeavoured 

 to fix such a point and to bring these known motions into agree- 

 ment with this idea. His results did not tally with the obser- 

 vations. His work remains, therefore, merely a magnificent 

 attempt. It may be that in later days it will be possible to take 

 up the problem with more hopes of success. It is, however, 

 based upon the idea that the force of gravitation is sufficient 

 to hold the suns to such an orbit. At the present time, as we 

 shall see, this is doubtful. 



It follows, therefore, that the conceptions we may make of 

 stellar arrangement are yet of the vaguest. It may be that 

 no such arrangement in the sense of definite systems exists. 

 We might here have recourse to the analogy of molecular and 

 molar motions, such as they are known to us. 



If there were aught in Lambert's vast ideas of systems 

 within systems, we might readily suppose that the succession 

 of " orders " which he imagined might extend inwards towards 

 the infinitely little as well as outwards towards the infinitely 

 vast. We might discover a like order in the structure of matter. 

 We might find, for example, that the atoms and molecules of 

 the chemist likewise possess a planetary arrangement. It is 

 curious to note that this is precisely the drift of present-day 

 conceptions of atomic structure. 



In the light of recent research, especially of Professor 

 J. J. Thomson of Cambridge University and his school, we 

 may conceive the atom as made up of a relatively large number 



