daylight by an
observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000
ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius
(alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant
and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the
precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and
nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund
and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging
towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic
drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from
immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with
which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a
parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the
earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed
in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds,
of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable
trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained
by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe
of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves
universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in
continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was
again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends
and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the
progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem
of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a
number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude
and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that,
the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000
pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to
be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed
integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
billi