forever unless hindered by the attraction of other stars. If they
go on thus, they must, after countless years, scatter in all
directions, so that the inhabitants of each shall see only a
black, starless sky.

Mathematical science can throw only a few glimmers of light on the
questions thus suggested. From what little we know of the masses,
distances, and numbers of the stars we see a possibility that the
more slow-moving ones may, in long ages, be stopped in their
onward courses or brought into orbits of some sort by the
attraction of their millions of fellows. But it is hard to admit
even this possibility in the case of the swift-moving ones.
Attraction, varying as the inverse square of the distance,
diminishes so rapidly as the distance increases that, at the
distances which separate the stars, it is small indeed. We could
not, with the most delicate balance that science has yet invented,
even show the attraction of the greatest known star. So far as we
know, the two swiftest-moving stars are, first, Arcturus, and,
second, one known in astronomy as 1830 Groombridge, the latter so
called because it was first observed by the astronomer
Groombridge, and is numbered 1830 in his catalogue of stars. If
our determinations of the distances of these bodies are to be
relied on, the velocity of their motion cannot be much less than
two hundred miles a second. They would make the circuit of the
earth every two or three minutes. A body massive enough to control
this motion would throw a large part of the universe into
disorder. Thus the problem where these stars came from and where
they are going is for us insoluble, and is all the more so from
the fact that the swiftly moving stars are moving in different
directions and seem to have no connection with each other or with