stars could be numbered. The telescope and photography have shown this to be impossible, and have taught us the overwhelming fact that our universe contains, at the very least, one hundred millions of suns, and that the light from some of the most distant stars has taken over 18,000 years to reach us! This seems very bewildering, though not more so than to know that there are animals so minute that if a thousand of them were ranged abreast they would easily swim, without being thrown out of line, through the eye of the finest needle. We live in the midst of incomprehensible marvels, infinitely great and infinitely small, between the limitless future and the limitless past.
What wonderful patience and toil it must have required for the astronomers of all nations, working together and comparing notes, to store up the vast amount of knowledge of the heavens which we now possess. It is amazing, too, to think how three or four hundred years ago they were able to make so many discoveries and calculations without the aid of a telescope. For before 1600 the telescope was practically unknown. So when you see standing in a modern observatory gigantic instruments, thirty or forty feet long, of marvelous ingenuity and highly complicated mechanism, which in spite of their size and weight are capable of being moved by a hair's breadth and adjusted to the hundredth part of an
