which at one time seemed to have attracted a great deal of attention. I allude to the discovery, or the alleged discovery I should rather say, of a certain "central sun," about which it was believed or stated that all the bodies in the universe revolved. This marvellous centre was becomingly located in the Pleiades indeed, if I remember aright, it was actually identified with the star Alcyone. The doctrine was certainly a splendid and captivating one, but it was too good to be true. No one ever hears anything about the central sun hypothesis nowadays, and that, perhaps, for the simple reason that it stood condemned on the face of it by the theory of probabilities. It is wholly unnecessary at this time of day to attempt to appraise the value of the observations by which an astronomer, justly esteemed for other labours, demonstrated, or thought he had demonstrated, the existence of a "central sun." Even if the apparent movements of certain stars offered quite unequivocal testimony (which, indeed, was by no means the case) to show that they were revolving around Alcyone, still it is obvious, on a little consideration, that even this famous star could not be regarded as the centre of the whole universe without doing unwarrantable violence to all notions of probability. For just look at the facts in their due proportion.
Alcyone, no doubt, is a star of magnificent dimensions. It may be a hundred or a thousand times more massive and more brilliant than our sun. Alcyone is so remote from the earth that the light which now arrives at our eyes, even though it speeds on its way at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, has not improbably taken a century, or more than a century, to reach us. The
