3 ° 
THE GUIDE TO NATURE 
of stars, the nearest of all being the 
cluster in Centaurus, whose light re- 
quires 21.300 years to come to us. The 
most distant of all so far discovered is 
so far away that even in the largest 
telescopes it appears only as a nebulous 
star ; its true nature was not discovered 
until 1912. The distance of this cluster 
is about 200.000 light years. 
Figure 3. from a drawing by Harlow 
Shapley of the Mount Wilson Solar 
Observatory, shows a section of our 
greatly extended, but very much flat- 
tened, Milky Way cloud, with the posi- 
tions of. the spherical clusters projected 
on the plane of this section. Every 
cluster is so very far away that we see 
only its brightest stars. Thus, in the 
cluster at C, Figure 1. the average 
brightness of the stars which we see 
is one hundred times that of our sun. 
Our own sun. were it removed to this 
cluster, would appear to us of magni- 
tude 21.5. and would not appear on any 
photograph ; Sirius, the greater Dog 
Star, would appear of magnitude 17.5 
and would be just visible. 
Moreover, the stars in any spherical 
cluster are very much crowded to- 
gether. Within a sphere so large that 
it includes twenty stars in the vicinity 
of our sun, there are no less than 15,000 
stars in the cluster at C. These are, 
indeed, marvelous aggregations of 
stars. Apparently it is only in empty 
space that the stars of an irregular 
cloud can. as the ages go by. arrange 
themselves in a perfectly spherical 
form. Within our Milky Way cloud, 
the disturbing pull of innumerable 
other suns would make this impossibly 
It is, therefore, not surprising that al- 
though the spherical clusters are found 
upon the borders of our universe of 
stars, none are found within it. 
We sometimes think that people who 
hear the Bible all the time get into the 
state of mind where they are not re- 
sponsive to it. just as a farmer, who is 
out in the open all the time and works 
in the fields and sees all sorts of grow- 
ing things, is not awakened by the 
sight of an apple tree in bloom or a field 
of waving grain, but a man who spends 
his days on paved streets finds that 
such sights tap a hidden reservoir of 
poetry and beauty in his soul. — The 
Chesterfieldian. 
What Profiteth It? 
[Excerpt from an editorial in The 
Chesterfieldian.] 
And the majority of us do not even 
understand the very mechanical things 
that are supposed to serve us. How 
much of the principle that underlies the 
operation of an elevated railroad does 
the little shop girl who daily travels on 
it to and from her work understand? 
She knows no more of its real working 
than did the Indian woman of two cen- 
turies ago who spent her life scraping 
skins and weaving baskets. 
A great many of us who had been in 
a habit of congratulating ourselves 
upon our civilization were quite jarred 
out of our complacency by the Great 
War. For we saw that centuries of 
so-called civilization not only had not 
abolished war but had not made it less 
terrible or even essentially different. 
And in our intellectual life, it seems 
as if the intellectual of today is no fur- 
ther advanced than the intellectual of 
centuries ago. Amid all this so-called 
civilization it seems that the soul with- 
ers rather than grows. It is virtually 
impossible for a man to do his work 
and live his life in a quiet, rational, 
kindly manner. He must organize his 
work into a business and rush pell-mell 
into competition with someone else. He 
must scheme and fight ; he must forget 
the principles of humanity ; he must 
give himself no time to think of any- 
thing but business ; and finally, he, him- 
self, must become, among his other vic- 
tims, a victim to that same mad pursuit. 
And nations do exactly the same thing 
in their mammoth commercial compe- 
tition. 
It appears to us that real civilization 
must be a thing of the soul, rather than 
of mere mechanical contrivances and 
systems outside of a man’s own soul, 
and until we understand that we shall 
never progress very far. Until we do, 
we may keep right on going through 
life, fighting, grasping, wounding oth- 
ers and being wounded ourselves, with- 
out ever having time to see or enjoy 
the real beauties and truths in the 
world about us and in our own souls. 
And until then we may still inquire 
of ourselves. “What profiteth it man if 
he gain the whole world yet lose his 
own soul ?” 
