THE WORLD BEYOND OUR SENSES 



absorbed by space. We know of stars so distant 

 that, though light travels six hundred million miles 

 per hour, they might have been blotted out before 

 Christ was born and they would still be shining 

 for us in the sky. Yet distant as they may be, 

 there is no reason to suppose that their light 

 reaches us in the least dimmed. If this be true, 

 then M. 1'Hermite has measured, crudely it may 

 be, the limits of the universe. Here we touch 

 a fascinating field of inquiry which will be more 

 fully dealt with in a succeeding chapter. 



Need it be remarked that these limits, if they 

 exist, lie far outside all human sense. But so, for 

 that matter, does the larger part of all physical 

 phenomena. This is true alike as to the macro- 

 cosm and the microcosm. So far as our native 

 senses go, the motion of the sun and of the moon 

 seems the same. Both appear to revolve about 

 the earth, and so the Middle Ages believed. One 

 guess turned out right, the other wrong. The 

 earth turns round at such a rate that a man on 

 the equator is travelling a thousand miles an hour, 

 seventeen miles a minute. At the same time, we 

 are plunging through space, in a circle round the 

 sun, at the rate of nineteen miles per second. The 

 whole solar system in turn, bag and baggage, the 

 sun and all its planets, from Venus to Jupiter and 

 Neptune, appears to be shooting towards the pole- 



67 



