BioKERTON. — 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 milhon 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 myiuads 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, scarcely even dressing 

 for dinner. In fact the vagaries of variable stars are so extraordinary that 

 they appear without any law or order ; but, as Mrs. Grundy rigidly regu- 



