Complete. From “Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad.”

THE DIAMETER of the earth’s orbit is, as it were, the pocket rule of the astronomer, with which he measures distances which the mind can no more grasp than infinity. This star measure is one hundred and ninety millions of miles in length. This the astronomer lays down on the floor of heaven, and drawing lines from its extremities to the nearest fixed star, or a centre, he finds the angle thus subtended by this base line to be not quite one second! By the simple Rule of Three he then arrives at the fact that the nearest fixed star is 21,000,000,000,000 miles distant.

  From another simple calculation it follows that in the space around our solar system devoid of stars, there is room in one dimension, or in one straight line, for 12,000 solar systems; in two dimensions, or in one plane, there is room for 130,000,000 of solar systems; and in actual siderial space of three dimensions there is room for 1,500,000,000,000 solar systems the size of our own.

  Nay, good farmer, do not look so unbelievingly. Your boy need not graduate from the district school to prove all this. One and one-half million millions of solar systems as large as ours might be set in the space which divides between it and its nearest neighbor. And if we might assume the aggregate population of our solar system to be 20,000,000,000, then there would be room enough for 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 of human beings to live, love, and labor in the worlds that might be planted in this same starless void.

  Nay, good man of the tow frock, hold on a moment longer. Our sun is but a dull, hazy speck of light in the great milky way, and Doctor Herschel says he discovered fifty thousand just such suns in that highway of worlds, in a space apparently a yard in breadth and six in length. Think of that a moment! and then that no two of them all are probably nearer each other than twenty billions of miles; and then, that the starless space between their solar systems might contain 1,500,000,000,000 of similar systems! Multiply these spaces and these systems by a hundred millions, and you will have numbered the world that a powerful glass will open to your view, from one point of space.

  Again, multiply these systems by twenty thousand millions, and you will have three billion trillions of human beings, who might dwell in peace and unity in that point of space which Herschel’s glass would disclose to your vision.

  And you ask despairingly, What is man? We will tell you what he is in one respect: the Creator of all these worlds is his God.