A sensible parallax of about one second has been ascertained in the case of the double star [ Alpha Centauri ] of the constellation of the Centaur, a… - Robert Chambers

It appears from this inquiry that color and other physiological characters are of a more superficial and accidental nature than was at one time supposed.

The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.

The elder Herschel, directing his wonderful tube towards the sides of our system, where stars are planted most rarely... was enabled with awe struck mind to see suspended in the vast empyrean astral systems, or, as he called them, firmaments, resembling our own. Like light cloudlets to a certain power of the telescope, they resolved themselves, under a greater power, into stars, though these generally seemed no larger than the finest particles of diamond dust. The general forms of these systems are various; but one at least has been detected as bearing a striking resemblance to the supposed form of our own. The distances are also various... The farthest observed by the astronomer were estimated by him as thirty-five thousand times more remote than Sirius, supposing its distance to be about twenty thousand millions of miles. It would thus appear, that not only does gravitation keep our earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp the unbounded.