tells us that his forty-foot reflector will bring him light
from a distance of "at least eleven and three-fourths
millions of millions of millions of miles"--light which
left its source two million years ago. The smallest
stars visible to the unaided eye are those of the sixth
magnitude; this telescope, he thinks, has power to
reveal stars of the 1342d magnitude.

But what did Herschel learn regarding these awful
depths of space and the stars that people them? That
was what the world wished to know. Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, had given us a solar system, but the
stars had been a mystery. What says the great
reflector--are the stars points of light, as the ancients
taught, and as more than one philosopher of the eighteenth
century has still contended, or are they suns, as
others hold? Herschel answers, they are suns, each
and every one of all the millions--suns, many of them,
larger than the one that is the centre of our tiny system.
Not only so, but they are moving suns. Instead of
being fixed in space, as has been thought, they are
whirling in gigantic orbits about some common centre. Is
our sun that centre? Far from it. Our sun is only a
star like all the rest, circling on with its attendant
satellites--our giant sun a star, no different from
myriad other stars, not even so large as some; a mere
insignificant spark of matter in an infinite shower of
sparks.

Nor is this all. Looking beyond the few thousand