Pleiades form a cluster of bright stars almost unique in their interest; and these circumstances might certainly render the notion that there lay the centre of the universe highly attractive to the imagination and perhaps even quite plausible. But the theory of probabilities at once upsets the whole doctrine when the facts are viewed in their proper light.
No doubt the theory of probabilities has nothing to say against Alcyone in comparison with any other star visible in the heavens, but what it does say is that it would be utterly preposterous to imagine that any one of the stars in the visible firmament could be the central sun around which all the bodies in the universe revolved. For summon up to your imagination the most distant star that can be seen with the unaided eye. Then think of the minutest star that our most potent telescope can disclose. Think of the tiniest stellar point of light which could possibly be depicted on the most sensitive photographic plate after hours of exposure to the heavens. Think, indeed, of the very remotest star which, by any conceivable device, can be rendered perceptible to our consciousness. Doubtless that star is thousands of billions of miles from the earth; doubtless the light from it requires thousands of years, and some astronomers have said millions of years, to span the abyss which intervenes between our globe and those distant regions. But, nevertheless, there is a certain number of miles, even though we know it not, at which the remotest stars known to us must lie. I do not speak of the most distant star which the universe may possibly contain; I only refer to the most distant star that we can possibly bring within our ken.
Imagine a great sphere to be described with its
