Like the sands of the sea, the stars of heaven have ever been used as an
appropriate symbol of number, and we know that there are some 75,000,000,
many, no doubt, with planets of their own. But this is by no means all.
The floor of heaven is not only "thick inlaid with patines of bright
gold," but is studded also with extinct stars, once probably as brilliant
as our own sun, but now dead and cold, as Helmholtz tells us our sun
itself will be some seventeen millions of years hence. Then, again, there
are the comets, which, though but few are visible to us at once, are even
more numerous than the stars; there are the nebulae, and the countless
minor bodies circulating in space, and occasionally visible as meteors.
Nor is it only the number of the heavenly bodies which is so overwhelming;
their magnitude and distances are almost more impressive. The ocean is so
deep and broad as to be almost infinite, and indeed in so far as our
imagination is the limit, so it may be. Yet what is the ocean compared to
the sky? Our globe is little compared to the giant orbs of Jupiter and
Saturn, which again sink into insignificance by the side of the sun.
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