and more
powerful, and with these the whole number of stars visible is carried
up into the millions, say perhaps to fifty or one hundred millions. For
aught we know every one of those stars may have planets like our own
circling round it, and these planets may be inhabited by beings equal
to ourselves. To suppose that our globe is the only one thus inhabited
is something so unlikely that no one could expect it. It would be very
nice to know something about the people who may inhabit these bodies,
but we must await our translation to another sphere before we can know
anything on the subject. Meanwhile, we have gained what is of more
value than gold or silver; we have learned that creation transcends all
our conceptions, and our ideas of its Author are enlarged accordingly.

XV

AN ASTRONOMICAL FRIENDSHIP

There are few men with whom I would like so well to have a quiet talk
as with Father Hell. I have known more important and more interesting
men, but none whose acquaintance has afforded me a serener
satisfaction, or imbued me with an ampler measure of a feeling that I
am candid enough to call self-complacency. The ties that bind us are
peculiar. When I call him my friend, I do not mean that we ever
hobnobbed together. But if we are in sympathy, what matters it that he
was dead long before I was born, that he lived in one century and I in
another? Such differences of generation count for little in the
brotherhood of astronomy, the work of whose members so extends through
all time that one might well forget that he belongs to one century or
to another.

Father Hell was an astronomer. Ask not whether he was a very great one,
for in our science we have no infallible gauge by which we try men and
measure their stature. He was a lover of science and an indefatigable
worker, and he did what in him lay to advance our knowledge of the
stars. Let that suffice. I love to fancy that in some other sphere,
either within this universe of ours or outside of it, all who have
successfully done this may some time gather and exchange greetings.
Should this come about there will be a few--Hipparchus and Ptolemy,
Copernicus and Newton, Galileo and Herschel--to be surrounded by
admiring crowds. But these men will have as warm a grasp and as kind a
word for the humblest of their followers, who has merely discovered a
comet or catalogued a nebula, as for the more brilliant of their
brethren.

My friend wrote the letters S. J. af