ous
spaces we are traversing when you consider that each successive planet
is nearly double as far from the Sun as the preceding one.

In the place where, by Bode's law, we should expect to have found the
next world, we find a group of small planets, ranging in size from
about 200 miles in diameter down to only a few hundred yards. They
pass through nearly the same point once in each of their periods of
revolution round the Sun, and it has been suggested that they are
fragments of a great globe rent asunder by some mighty catastrophe;
over 400 of these little worlds have been discovered and have received
names, or are known under certain numbers.

We now continue our voyage over the next huge space and arrive at
Jupiter, the largest and grandest of the planets. This world is more
than 1000 times larger than our Earth, its circumference being
actually greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It has
seven moons, and its year is about twelve times as long as ours.
Pursuing our journey, we next come to Saturn. It is nearly as large as
Jupiter, and has a huge ring of planetary matter revolving round it in
addition to seven moons. Further and further we go, and the planets
behind us are disappearing, and even the Sun is dwindling down to a
mere speck; still we hurry on, and at last alight on another planet,
Uranus, about sixty times larger than our Earth; we see moons in
attendance, but they have scarcely any light to reflect; the Sun is
only a star now; but we must hasten on deeper and deeper into space.
We shall again, as formerly, have to go nearly as far beyond the last
planet as that planet is from the Sun. The mind cannot grasp these
huge distances. Still we travel on to the last planet, Neptune,
revolving on its lonely orbit; sunk so deep into space that, though it
rushes round the Sun at the rate of 22,000 miles per hour, it takes
164 of our years to complete one revolution. Now let us look back from
this remote point. What do we see? One planet only, Uranus, is visible
to the unaided eye; the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have
disappeared, and the Sun itself is now only a star; practically no
heat, no light, all is darkness in this solitary world; the Sun is
1000 times smaller than we see it from the earth, and gives,
therefore, only one-thousandth part of its heat and light. Thus far
have we gone, and, standing there at the enormous distance of
3,000,000,000 miles from our starting-point, we can