Leverrier made it 91,759,000.  Airy and Stone, by another method, made it 91,400,000; Stone alone, by a revision of the old observations, 91,730,000; and finally, Foucault and Fizeau, from physical experiments, determining the velocity of light, and therefore in their nature altogether differing from transit observations, 91,400,000.  Until the results of the transit of next year (1874) are ascertained, it must therefore be admitted that the distance of the earth from the sun is somewhat less than ninety-two million miles.

This distance once determined, the dimensions of the solar system may be ascertained with ease and precision.  It is enough to mention that the distance of Neptune from the sun, the most remote of the planets at present known, is about thirty times that of the earth.

By the aid of these numbers we may begin to gain a just appreciation of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe—­the doctrine that all things were made for man.  Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams.  If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye; then let him consider one of its dots or full stops; that dot is several hundred times larger in surface than is the earth as seen from the sun!

Of what consequence, then, can such an almost imperceptible particle be?  One might think that it could be removed or even annihilated, and yet never be missed.  Of what consequence is one of those human monads, of whom more than a thousand millions swarm on the surface of this all but invisible speck, and of a million of whom scarcely one will leave a trace that he has ever existed?  Of what consequence is man, his pleasures or his pains?

Among the arguments brought forward against the Copernican system at the time of its promulgation, was one by the great Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, originally urged by Aristarchus against the Pythagorean system, to the effect that, if, as was alleged, the earth moves round the sun, there ought to be a change of the direction in which the fixed stars appear.  At one time we are nearer to a particular region of the heavens by a distance equal to the whole diameter of the earth’s orbit than we were six months previously, and hence there ought to be a change in the relative position of the stars; they should seem to separate as we approach them, and to close together as we recede from them; or, to use the astronomical expression, these stars should have a yearly parallax.

The parallax of a star is the angle contained between two lines drawn from it—­one to the sun, the other to the earth.

At that time, the earth’s distance from the sun was greatly under-estimated.  Had it been known, as it is now, that that distance exceeds ninety million miles, or that the diameter of the orbit is more than one hundred and eighty million, that argument would doubtless have had very great weight.