Philosophers could not believe that the Creator would waste
room by allowing the inconceivable spaces which appeared to lie between
our system and the fixed stars to remain unused, and so thought there
must be something wrong in the theory of the earth's motion.

Not until the nineteenth century was well in progress did the most
skilful observers of their time, Bessel and Struve, having at command
the most refined instruments which science was then able to devise,
discover the reality of the parallax of the stars, and show that the
nearest of these bodies which they could find was more than 400,000
times as far as the 93,000,000 of miles which separate the earth from
the sun. During the half-century and more which has elapsed since this
discovery, astronomers have been busily engaged in fathoming the
heavenly depths. The nearest star they have been able to find is about
280,000 times the sun's distance. A dozen or a score more are within
1,000,000 times that distance. Beyond this all is unfathomable by any
sounding-line yet known to man.

The results of these astronomical measures are stupendous beyond
conception. No mere statement in numbers conveys any idea of it. Nearly
all the brighter stars are known to be flying through space at speeds
which generally range between ten and forty or fifty miles per second,
some slower and some swifter, even up to one or two hundred miles a
second. Such a speed would carry us across the Atlantic while we were
reading two or three of these sentences. These motions take place some
in one direction and some in another. Some of the stars are coming
almost straight towards us. Should they reach us, and pass through our
solar system, the result would be destructive to our earth, and perhaps
to our sun.

Are we in any danger? No, because, however madly they may come, whether
ten, twenty, or one hundred miles per second, so many millions of years
must elapse before they reach us that we need give ourselves no concern
in the matter. Probably none of them are coming straight to us; their
course deviates just a hair's-breadth from our system, but that
hair's-breadth is so large a quantity that when the millions of years
elapse their course will lie on one side or the other of our system and
they will do no harm to our planet; just as a bullet fired at an insect
a mile away would be nearly sure to miss it in one direction or the
other.

Our instrument makers have constructed telescopes more