lt,T. III. FIRMAMENT OF THE FIXED STARS. 49

" A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,

And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear,

Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way,

Which nightly, as a circling zone thou scestPowder’d with stars.” --

Milton.

The immense distance of the fixed stars fromour earth, and from each other, is, of all con-siderations, the most proper for raising our ideasof the works of God, and the extent of thecreation. The star nearest to us, and conse-quently the largest in appearance, is Sirius,or the dog-star. Now the earth, in movinground the fun, is 195 millions of miles nearerto this star in one part of its orbit, than in theopposite one; and yet the magnitude of thestar appears to be not in the least altered, or itsdistance affected by it. The celebrated Huy-gens carried his thoughts so far upon this sub-ject, as to believe that there might be stars,at such inconceivable distances from our earth,that their light, though it is known to travelat the rate of ten millions of miles in a minute,has not yet reached us since the creation of theworld.

The stars being at such prodigious distancesfrom the fun, cannot poffibly receive from him sostrong a light as they seem to possess, nor even adegree of brightness sufficient to make them vi-sible to us. For his rays would be so scattered andE dissipated