the smallest telescopic
magnitude_."[188] It may assist us to understand the full import of this
declaration, to remember that Lord Rosse's large telescope clearly
defines any object on the moon's surface as large as the Custom House.
Its power of penetrating space surpasses our power of imagination, but
is represented by saying, that light, which flashes from San Francisco
to London quicker than you can close your eye and open it again,
requires _millions of years_ to travel to our earth from the most
distant star-cloud discoverable by this telescope.[189] If a galaxy like
this of ours existed anywhere within this amazing distance, that
telescope would discover its existence. It has, in fact, augmented the
universe visible to us, 125,000,000 times, and thus made us feel that
not merely this world, which constitutes our earthly all, and yon
glorious sun, which shines upon it, but all the host of heaven's suns,
and planets, and moons, and firmaments, which our unaided eyes behold,
are but as a handful of the sand of the ocean shore compared with the
immensity of the universe. But ever, and along with this, it has shown
us the ocean as well as the shore, and revealed boundless regions of
darkness and solitude stretching around and far away beyond these
islands of existence. The telescope, then, enlarges and confirms our
views of the extent of the unoccupied portions of space.

If there were only one dark point of the heavens no larger than the
apparent magnitude of the smallest star, this one unoccupied space would
sufficiently disprove the infinity of the universe, inasmuch as there
would be a portion of space of boundless length, and of a diameter not
less than the diameter of the earth's orbit, say 190,000,000 miles, in
which stars might exist, as they do in its borders, but yet do not. But
the argument becomes utterly overwhelming, when the attempt is made to
calculate the proportion of space occupied by the stars to that left
unoccupied. Whether we take Herschel's computation, that the nebulae
cover one two hundred and seventieth part of the superficies of the
visible heaven,[190] or Struve's supposition of the existence of a star
subtending no measurable angle, in every part of the visible sky as
large as the surface of the moon, the vast disproportion of the
universe, to the space in which it is placed, forces itself upon our
notice. For, upon the largest of these computations, the proportion of
existence to empty