388 
eight years to reach us,* light being then supposed to travel 
at the rate of 192,000t miles per second; also that the light 
from the smallest stars visible to the naked eye could not have 
reached the earth in less than 138 years ; while the light from 
the smallest stars visible in Herschel's 20-feet reflecting 
telescope must have occupied 3,541 years in reaching the 
earth. J These few figures are more than enough for my 
present purpose, which is utterly to discredit this notion, and 
all that has been deduced from it, as ab initio and altogether 
absurd. It is part of this teaching that stars of the second 
magnitude, that is, stars only less bright than Sirius , must 
have been shining in the firmament for twenty- eight years 
before they were visible on the earth ; and that the smallest 
stars visible to the naked eye must have been invisible for 138 
years. The converse absurdity (as I will venture here to call 
it) has also been taught, that if such stars ceased to exist, 
they would continue as visible stars, to earthly eyes and tele- 
scopes, for 28 years and 138 years respectively after their non- 
existence ! It has also been gravely put forward that there 
may be stars so distant that their light has not yet reached 
the earth, though it will yet do so ; and again, with converse 
absurdity, that stars may be visible in our telescopes, as appa- 
rently existing visible stars, thousands of years after they have 
ceased to exist ! To enable you the better to realize the 
absurdity of this, I may observe that it implies that the stars 
forming the Milky Way, as seen by us every night, and by 
Hipparchus and Ptolemy' 2,000 years ago, might have been 
equally visible, though they had ceased to exist hundreds or 
thousands of years before ! It also implies that the twinkling 
of the stars, and the changes in their brilliant prismatic hues, 
that we gaze on with admiration any evening, are twinklings 
and changes that occurred many years before, and not at the 
moment we see them ! Whether upon Newton's now aban- 
doned corpuscular theory, or the modern undulatory theory of 
the transmission of light, I can only characterize all this as 
absurd; and (granting either theory to be true, though I 
believe in neither,) as being a confounding of the supposed 
motion of light with our mode of seeing objects. It is, I 
consider, refuted every evening as the stars rise and set, and 
indeed every time we shut and open our eyes to look upon them. 
We see dark objects, as well as those that are bright and which 
are said to “ emit light," the moment they are exhibited to us, if 
* Grant, p. 553. 
t Now reduced to 183,470 miles per second. — Vide Eeddie’s Current 
Phys. Ast., book iii. p. 48. (Hardwicke.) + Grant, p. 553. 
