around which the earth and other planets revolve while it remains
fixed in one place. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sun
is, in fact, the most wonderful of travelers. He is flying through
space at the rate of not less than a hundred and sixty millions of
miles in a year, and the earth and her sister planets are his fellow
voyagers, which, obeying his overpowering attraction, circle about him
as he advances. In other words, if we could take up a position in open
space in advance of the sun, we should see him rushing toward us at
the rate of some 450,000 miles a day, chased by his whole family of
shining worlds and the vast swarms of meteoric bodies which obey his
attraction.

The general direction of this motion of the solar system has been
known since the time of Sir William Herschel. It is toward the
constellation Hercules, which, at this season, may be seen in the
northeastern sky at 9 o'clock in the evening. As the line of this
motion makes an angle of fifty odd degrees with the plane of the
earth's orbit, it follows that the earth is not like a horse at a
windlass, circling around the sun forever in one beaten path, but like
a ship belonging to a fleet whose leader is continually pushing its
prow into unexplored waters.

The path of the earth through space is spiral, so that it is all the
time advancing into new regions along with the sun. She is on a
boundless voyage of discovery, and her human crew are born and die in
widely separated tracts of space. Think of the distance over which the
travels of the sun have borne the earth only since the beginning of
human history! Six thousand years ago the earth and sun were about a
million millions of miles further from the stars in Hercules than they
are to-day. Columbus and his contemporaries lived when the earth was