The World of Comets

The universe is formed of an infinity of worlds similar to our own. The thousands of stars which meet our gaze in the azure vault of the heavens when we contemplate it with the naked eye, and which may be reckoned by hundreds of millions when we explore its depths by the aid of the telescope, are suns. These foci of light, these sources of heat, and incontestably of life, are not isolated; they are distributed into groups or clusters; sometimes by twos or threes, sometimes by hundreds, sometimes by myriads; the clouds of vaporous light called nebulse are for the most part thus constituted.

Isolated or in groups, the stars seem to us immovable, so prodigious is the distance by which they are separated from the earth and from our sun. They move nevertheless ; and amongst those whose velocities have as yet been measured may be reckoned some which are moving ten times and even fifty times quicker than a cannon-ball when it leaves the cannon. Movement is, therefore, the most universal law of the stars.

In like manner our sun moves through space and compels the earth to follow. He bears along with him, in this voyage through the boundless ether, the globes which form his cortege and gravitate about his enormous mass.