lO JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



from without. If distance could thus reduce for us the scale 

 upon which the universe is fashioned to one we could take in, 

 on such a one the earth would be represented by a good sized 

 pea, the moon by a grain of sand, circling around it at a distance 

 of 7 inches, the sun, by a globe 3 feet in diameter, 215 feet 

 away. Mars, a much smaller pea, would circle around the 2 

 foot globe 325 feet from its surface ; Jupiter, an orange, at a 

 distance one-fifth of a mile ; Saturn, a small orange, at two- 

 fifths of a mile, and Uranus and Neptune, good sized plums, 

 ^ mile and 1 1^ miles away respectively. On the same scale 

 the nearest star would lie 8,000 miles off, and an average 3rd 

 magnitude star at about the present distance of our moon. 

 That is, on a scale upon which the moon would be but 7 inches 

 off, the average star would be still as far from us as the moon is 

 now, or 240,000 miles away. Alpha Centauri is ver}- near us, 

 comparatively most of the stars are at least ten times as far 

 away and many of them thousands of times farther off. Pol- 

 aris, which we all know as the North Star, is 36 light years, 

 the light by which we see it to-night left it in 1862, and the 

 light which leaves it at this moment will not reach us until 

 babes now born have grown to man's estate. To describe in 

 miles the scale upon which the universe is built would be useless, 

 the mind would merely feebly struggle with bewildering gi'oups 

 of figures and at the best grope in the gloom of a multiplying 

 and ever midtiplying jargon of statistics. Even when we take 

 as our foot-rule the sun's distance from us of 93,000,000 miles it 

 does not help us when we take as our unit of measurement the 

 distance light travels in a year or a light year as it is called, 

 even then we are bewildered in a whirl of darkness and diffi- 

 culty. Were we to-night, on some viewless courser of the air, 

 to wing our way to any of the bright stars which clip vis round 

 about, sweeping away from our own system until earth vanishes 

 and planets melt away, and finally' the sun wanes into a mere star 

 and alight upon some new world that circles round the mighty 

 Sirius, that monarch of suns, which measures 7000 of our suns 

 in volume. Let us pause and look out then upon the heavens. 

 We have crossed a gulf of 60 trillions of miles across which a 



