224 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



ception is, indeed, a tremendous flight of human thought 

 and ingenuity ! 



It is the courage, the audacity one may almost call 

 it the superhuman calmness of astronomers, in the face 

 of this truly overwhelming immensity that not only 

 redeems their study from the oppressive and terrifying 

 character with which it at first assails the human spirit, 

 but gives to their proceedings and discoveries, so far as 

 the ordinary man can follow them, an unequalled fascina- 

 tion. The daring, the patience, the accuracy, and the 

 supreme intellectual gifts of the great astronomers rightly 

 fill other men with pride in the fact that there are human 

 minds capable of revealing things of such stupendous 

 vastness and of indicating their order and relation to one 

 another. It is a splendid fact, and one which must give 

 hope and courage to all men, that the astronomer's mind 

 does not totter it is equal to his task. Astronomers are, 

 in fact, triumphant : they are very far indeed from suffer- 

 ing from the depression which Mr. Hardy's young star- 

 gazer experienced. 



Among the many conclusions of astronomers as to 

 the movements of the "heavenly bodies" none is more 

 strange and mysterious in its suggestion than that recently 

 arrived at to the effect that in all this vast array ot 

 millions of stars, the limits of which we can neither dis- 

 cover nor imagine, there are two huge streams moving in 

 opposite directions, and in one or other all the stars are 

 involved. Whence do they start ? Where are they going ? 

 There is no answer. Another conclusion, which is arrived 

 at quite simply by the examination with the spectroscope 

 of the light coming from the star named Vega by astro- 

 nomers, is that our sun and its attendant planets are 

 moving towards that star. It is true that it is many 

 billions of miles away from us, but we are rushing towards 

 it somewhat rapidly according to mundane notions 



