54 W STARRY REALMS. 



ficence of the starry system will begin to assume proper 

 proportions. But this is only the first step, you must 

 next look at the smaller stars, and reflect that they, too, 

 are also suns, only much farther off, as a general rule, 

 than the brighter stars, though this is by no means in- 

 variably the case. Thus your estimate of the number of 

 suns in the universe will rise to thousands, but you will 

 not stop there, you will get a telescope to help you, and 

 to your extreme delight and wonder you will find that 

 there are hosts of stars too faint to be visible to the 

 eye, but which the telescope will immediately disclose. 

 You will get a more powerful instrument, and then you 

 will perceive that the stars are to be numbered by tens of 

 thousands, and even by millions, and with every fresh acces- 

 sion of power in your telescope fresh troops and myriads of 

 suns are revealed. Suns in clusters, suns strewn thickly 

 here and sparsely there, so as to give us the notion that 

 the only limit to the number we can see is the power of 

 the telescopes we are using. Attempts at actual numera- 

 tion are futile, for who can tell the number of the stars ? 



We can, however, form an estimate, and by taking 

 samples, so to speak, of the sky here and other samples 

 there, we have been enabled to learn the overwhelming 

 fact that our universe does contain at the very least one 

 hundred millions of suna. 



