But it should not be inferred from
this that Vega is drawing us on; it is too distant for its gravitation
to have such an effect.
Many unaccustomed thoughts are suggested by this mighty voyage of the
solar system. Whence have we come, and whither do we go? Every year of
our lives we advance at least 375,000,000 miles. Since the traditional
time of Adam the sun has led his planets through the wastes of space
no less than 225,000,000,000 miles, or more than 2400 times the
distance that separates him from the earth. Go back in imagination to
the geologic ages, and try to comprehend the distance over which the
earth has flown. Where was our little planet when it emerged out of
the clouds of chaos? Where was the sun when his ``thunder march''
began? What strange constellations shone down upon our globe when its
masters of life were the monstrous beasts of the ``Age of Reptiles''?
A million years is not much of a span of time in geologic reckoning,
yet a million years ago the earth was farther from its present place
in space than any of the stars with a measurable parallax are now. It
was more than seven times as far as Sirius, nearly fourteen times as
far as Alpha Centauri, three times as far as Vega, and twice as far as
Arcturus. But some geologists demand two hundred, three hundred, even
one thousand million years to enable them to account for the
evolutionary development of the earth and its inhabitants.
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