unnoticed and unknown except by the star-charting astronomer.

Conflagrations in the Heavens

Suppose it were possible for the world to take fire and burn up -- as
some pessimists think that it will do when the Divine wrath shall have
sufficiently accumulated against it -- nobody out of our own little
corner of space would ever be aware of the catastrophe! With all their
telescopes, the astronomers living in the golden light of Arcturus or
the diamond blaze of Canopus would be unable to detect the least
glimmer of the conflagration that had destroyed the seat of Adam and
his descendents, just as now they are totally ignorant of its
existence.

But at least fifteen times in the course of recorded history men
looking out from the earth have beheld in the remote depths of space
great outbursts of fiery light, some of them more splendidly luminous
than anything else in the firmament except the sun! If they were
conflagrations, how many million worlds like ours were required to
feed their blaze?

It is probable that ``temporary'' or ``new'' stars, as these wonderful
apparitions are called, really are conflagrations; not in the sense of
a bonfire or a burning house or city, but in that of a sudden eruption
of inconceivable heat and light, such as would result from the
stripping off the shell of an encrusted sun or the crashing together
of two mighty orbs flying through space with a hundred times the
velocity of the swiftest cannon-shot.

Temporary stars are the rarest and most erratic of astronomical