‘ 7 I 0) 
—a ¥ 7 lh 
ae 
116 BAILLY. 
are beyond all criticism. But.the question has been suffi- 
ciently discussed in a passage of The Eaposition of the 
System of the World, on which it would be useless to 
insist here. Whatever came from the pen of M. de La- 
place was always marked by the stamp of reason and of 
evidence. In the first lines of his magnificent work, 
after having remarked that “the history of Astronomy 
forms an essential part of the history of the human 
mind,” Bailly observes, “that it is perhaps the true 
measure of man’s intelligence, and a proof of what he 
can do with time and genius.” I shall allow myself to 
add, that no study offers to reflecting minds more striking 
or more curious relations. 
When by measurements, in which the evidence of the 
method advances equally with the precision of the results, 
the volume of the earth is reduced to the millionth part 
of the volume of the sun; when the sun himself, trans- 
ported to the region of the stars, takes up a very modest 
place among the thousands of millions of those bodies 
that the telescope has revealed to us ; when the 38,000,000 
of leagues which separate the earth from the sun, have 
become, by reason of their comparative smallness, a base 
totally insufficient for ascertaining the dimensions of the 
visible universe; when even the swiftness of the lumi- 
nous rays (77,000 leagues per second) barely suffices for 
the common valuations of science; when, in short, by a 
chain of irresistible proofs, certain stars have retired to 
distances that light could not traverse in less than a mil- 
lion of years ; we feel as if annihilated by such immensities. 
In assigning to man, and to the planet that he inhabits, 
so small a position in the material world, Astronomy seems 
really to have made progress only to humble us. 
But if, on the other hand, we regard the subject from 
