of rather material proof.

     Does the earth appear of great magnitude?  Yet how small it is in comparison with the circle the moon describes round it.  Which is not less than 480,000 miles in diameter.  And how small is this circle when compared with that the earth yearly describes round the sun which is more than 190,000,000 miles.  And how small does even this immense circle appear when we are told that the orbit of Herschel is 1800,000,000 of miles in diameter.  Nay this immense circle diminishes to a point when we learn that the nearest fixed star cannot be less than 38 billions of miles distant from us!  That is to say a cannon ball moving at the rate of eight miles an hour would not reach the nearest fixed star in less an nine millions of years.  And yet if your imaginations my hearers are not already stretched to this utmost extent you may be told that the most remote of the fixed stars visible are 497 times farther from us than the nearest!

     Does the velocity of the earth appear almost incredible?  it is not as already stated but 66,000 miles per hour: yet the planet Mercury moves 105,000 miles in the same time and the comet that appeared in the year 1680 when nearest the sun moved 880,000 miles every hour.  But this is a slow motion when compared with the velocity of the particles of light.  These come from the sun to the earth at a distance