With this speed it would
make the circuit of our globe in two minutes, and had it gone
round and round in our latitudes we should have seen it fly past
us a number of times since I commenced this discourse. It would
make the journey from the earth to the sun in five days. If it is
now near the centre of our universe it would probably reach its
confines in a million of years. So far as our knowledge goes,
there is no force in nature which would ever have set it in motion
and no force which can ever stop it. What, then, was the history
of this star, and, if there are planets circulating around, what
the experience of beings who may have lived on those planets
during the ages which geologists and naturalists assure us our
earth has existed? Was there a period when they saw at night only
a black and starless heaven? Was there a time when in that heaven
a small faint patch of light began gradually to appear? Did that
patch of light grow larger and larger as million after million of
years elapsed? Did it at last fill the heavens and break up into
constellations as we now see them? As millions more of years
elapse will the constellations gather together in the opposite
quarter and gradually diminish to a patch of light as the star
pursues its irresistible course of two hundred miles per second
through the wilderness of space, leaving our universe farther and
farther behind it, until it is lost in the distance? If the
conceptions of modern science are to be considered as good for all
time--a point on which I confess to a large measure of scepticism--
then these questions must be answered in the affirmative.
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