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146 the telescope. You may see it in those beautiful systems of double and triple stars, that are now known to exist in various parts of the firmament. Those countless suns that fill the heavens, and which were called, of old, "fixed stars," being supposed to be fixed and motionless in their places, are now ascertained to be by no means fixed, but all in rapid motion, revolving round each other in every variety of graceful movement, and in orbits whose immensity is altogether inconceivable. Look up, for instance, on a clear evening, and observe the middle star in the tail of the Great Bear. That is a double star, which, with the small star lying near it, makes a triple system, the bodies composing which revolve round each other, or, rather, round a common centre, in the enormous period of 180,000 years. Still more interesting and wonderful is a system of stars in the constellation Lyra. It is a quadruple system,—one pair of stars, revolving about another pair. The two stars composing one of the pairs, revolve round each other in about a thousand years; those of the other pair, in about two thousand: but one pair revolves about the other pair, as it is estimated, in not less than the inconceivable period of 560,000 years. What a thought is this! How do our little times and seasons shrink into insignificance before these awful periods! How do our little doings of a day lose themselves, and become unnoticeable and invisible, before these tremendous works and movements of the Almighty Creator! Yet, in the workings of these vast and complicated systems of suns, we may note the presence of the same single law, which serves to bind together the various parts of our own solar system, as well as the particles of every orb that goes to compose