Brioxerton.—On the Genesis of Worlds and Systems. 189 
visionaries, neglected their business, and again went star-gazing. Many 
others followed the pernicious example of these unpractical dreamers, until 
the long succession of such lunatics, and the wonderful method of their 
madness, impelled even the most stolid to look for themselves, and then 
the astonishing discovery was made that men were not entirely composed 
of pocket and stomach. In fact, that unless development were to proceed 
backwards, and the tail again manifest itself, intellectual food was perhaps 
as essential as corporeal. In this way, after many efforts, the human mind 
has escaped its leading strings, has travelled, and seen on what a vast scale 
the Universe has been constructed; has gauged the Sun and seen him to 
be a million times larger than the Earth, and the millions of stars, suns 
like himself; has seen the earth sink into a small particle of cosmical dust 
of insignificant dimensions, compared to even the visible universe. 
But do we think less highly of the earth for these extensions of our 
ideas? Certainly not. Like the travelled man returning to his boyhood’s 
home, it is true the church spire may have lost its relative grandeur and 
altitude, and he no longer looks in his back garden for the earth’s axis, yet 
he loves the place none the less, and finds the brook as clear and the wild 
flowers as fragrant as when he left; with all kinds of poetic essences 
diffused around everything, which it never would have had without the 
wider knowledge he has brought back with him. 
So, whilst the Universe has been made to reveal its myriads of blazing 
suns and systems of suns, the Earth has unfolded to our eyes an endless 
diversity of treasures, and thus at once an infinity of massive grandeur and 
an infinity of detailed beauty have been simultaneously discovered. 
But astronomers tell us that among the myriads of ordinary stars or 
rather suns which form the milky way, there are many erratic members 
and many bodies altogether unlike the general order. Some ten thousand 
stars are such close pairs that they appear to form twin suns, sometimes 
each of the twins have still smaller suns revolving round the larger one. 
In some places the stars appear so thickly spread that to the naked eye 
they are mere specks of mist, but the telescope says they are clusters of 
suns. Over a hundred stars appear to be altogether abnormal in their 
properties, shining with varying intensity at different times, and at some 
of their bright periods shining much more intensely than at other times. 
Quite like a modern belle going through regular short cycles of brilliancy, 
as each day rolls on, and, like her also, having, as it were, London and 
country seasons, for, after going through long periods of brilliant dress and 
undress, it gradually sinks into humdrum country life, searcely even n dressing 
for dinner. In fact the vagaries of variable stars are so ex that 
they appear without any law or order; but, as Mrs. Grundy rigidly regu- 
