Then, I thought other eyes came and peered, and yet others; until a whole galaxy of malignant, staring orbs seemed to hold me in thrall.

And does not your local star system move within the Milky Way at the rate of two hundred miles per second, and does not the Milky Way drift with respect to the remote external galaxies at the rate of one hundred miles per second and in all different directions, and does not your galaxy itself make a complete rotation about an axis every two hundred million years?

" "Well," continued the being, "even if you mortals could travel at the speed of light, it would still take you a hundred thousand years to cross your galaxy from edge to edge.

By which is not meant an infinite extension of galaxies in space, but the co-existence and, so to speak, interpenetration of an infinity of modes of existence imperceptible to us.

True, the individual objects, great or small, from a galaxy to a moth, which have to us apparently a separate existence, have all been evolved out of preceding modes of being, by a process which seems to us to involve a beginning, and to ensure an end.

14 He fought secure of fortune as of fame: Still by new maps the island might be shown, Of conquests, which he strew'd where'er he came, Thick as the galaxy with stars is sown.