10 The Bible of Nature 



charms her secret from the latest moon." We 

 annihilate distance with our deep devices and 

 make the ether carry our signals. We bring the 

 moon so near that our maps of it are better than 

 those of Africa three generations ago. We meas- 

 ure the distance of the stars; we analyze the chemi- 

 cal composition of the sun. It is enough to re- 

 call Fraunhofer's fine epitaph, " Approximavit 

 sidera." 



Thus size and distance are ceasing to impress 

 us as they impressed our forefathers. We are be- 

 coming accustomed to the immensities. Yet we 

 do well to sit down quietly at times under the 

 starry heavens, and remember that though light 

 travels 186,000 miles a second, we might perchance 

 observe the twinkling of a star that had gone out; 

 that when we look at a Centauri, which lies some 

 ten billions of miles nearer to us than any other 

 known star, we see it, not as it is to-night, but as it 

 was more than four years ago; that, though our 

 sun is 93,000,000 of miles away (and no one of us 

 has any mental picture of what a million is), the 

 farthest star we can see is a million times farther 

 off; that for every one of the few thousands (say 

 8,000) of stars we can see with our unaided eyes 

 there are thousands unseen (say, a hundred mil- 

 lions); and that our whole solar system is equiv- 

 alent in size to no more than a corner of the Milky 

 Way. In the heavens the navigator sails in a 



