they were able without having succeeded in detecting any such
apparent motion among the stars. Here was a mystery which they
could not solve. Either the Copernican system was not true, after
all, and the earth did not move in an orbit, or the stars were at
such immense distances that the whole immeasurable orbit of the
earth is a mere point in comparison. Philosophers could not
believe that the Creator would waste room by allowing the
inconceivable spaces which appeared to lie between our system and
the fixed stars to remain unused, and so thought there must be
something wrong in the theory of the earth's motion.

Not until the nineteenth century was well in progress did the most
skilful observers of their time, Bessel and Struve, having at
command the most refined instruments which science was then able
to devise, discover the reality of the parallax of the stars, and
show that the nearest of these bodies which they could find was
more than 400,000 times as far as the 93,000,000 of miles which
separate the earth from the sun. During the half-century and more
which has elapsed since this discovery, astronomers have been
busily engaged in fathoming the heavenly depths. The nearest star
they have been able to find is about 280,000 times the sun's
distance. A dozen or a score more are within 1,000,000 times that
distance. Beyond this all is unfathomable by any sounding-line yet
known to man.

The results of these astronomical measures are stupendous beyond
conception. No mere statement in numbers conveys any idea of it.
Nearly all the brighter stars are known to be flying through space
at speeds which generally range between ten and forty or fifty
miles per second, some slower and some swifter, even up to one or