Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1882 — Railroad Fare to the Stars. [ARTICLE]

Railroad Fare to the Stars.

The idea of distance is often beat conveyed by some every-day illustration. When Horace wrote “Sic itur ad astra,” —Thus it is traveled to the stars—he was not thinking of railroads. But they are familiar enough to us. In a lecture by Dr. William Huggins, the eminent English astronomer, an to the results of spectrum analysis as applied to the heavenly bodies, this striking statement was used to give some faint notion of the enormous distance of the stars. “The earth’s orbit,'* said the lecturer, “which is more than one hundred and ninety million miles in diameter, at most of the stars dwindles to a mere point, and has no sensible size whatever. ' “If you suppose a railroad from -the earth to the nearest fixed star, which is supposed to be twenty billions of miles irvni us, and if you suppose the price of the fare to be one penny for every hundred miles—not, mind, a penny per mile—then, if you take a mass of gold to the ticket office equal to the national debt (three billion, eight hundred million dollars), it would not be sufficient to pay for a ticket to the nearest fixecHstar. “And I think I should not be. wrong in saying that thbre are stars so far off that at the price of one penny for every hundred miles, the whole treasure of the earth would not be sufficient to pay for a ticket.”

Thb last legal execution in Ugland for witchcraft occurred in 1716, but in 1863 a reputed wizard was drowned in a pond at the village of Heddingham, in Essex, not forty miles from .London ; while in 1867 “Dr. Harris” was committed for trial at the Radnorshire assizes for duping persons into the belief that their ailments were caused by their being “ witched,” and for professing to cure them by giving them charms to wear suspended round their necks.