50 THE SUN. 



come to measure in figures either the magnitude or 

 the minuteness of its mechanisms, we find our arith- 

 metic almost breaking down in the attempt, and num- 

 bers of ten or twenty places of figures, as it were tossed 

 about like dust, and turning up on every occasion. 



(4.) To come then to our subject. The first and 

 most important office the sun has to perform in our 

 system is to keep it together, to keep its members from 

 parting company, from seceding, and running off into 

 outer darkness, out of the reach of the genial influence 

 of his beams. Were the sun simply extinguished, the 

 planets would all continue to circulate round it as they 

 do at present, only in cold and darkness ; but were it 

 annihilated, each would from that moment set forth 

 on a journey into infinite space in the direction in 

 which it happened then to be moving ; and wander 

 on, centuries after centuries, lost in that awful abyss 

 which separates us from the stars, and without making 

 any sensible approach even to the nearest of them in 

 many hundreds or even thousands of years. The power 

 by which the sun is enabled to perform this office to 

 gather the planets round its hearth and to keep them 

 there is the same in kind (though very different in 

 intensity) with that which when a stone is thrown up 

 into the air draws it down again to the earth. As to 

 the manner in which this is effected by the weight of 

 the stone, or its tendency to fall straight down, acting 

 to turn or draw it out of its right-lined course oblique 

 to the surface, and oblige it to move in a curve, with 

 the explanation of that we have here nothing to do. 



