It can also be known when they will happen again for a thousand years to come, or to any other portion of time.
As therefore, man could not be able to do these things if he did not understand the solar system, and the manner in which the revolutions of the several planets or worlds are performed, the fact of calculating an eclipse, or a transit of Venus, is a proof in point that the knowledge exists; and as to a few thousand, or even a few million miles, more or less, it makes scarcely any sensible difference in such immense distances .-- Author.] But this, immense as it is, is only one system of worlds.

Beyond this, at a vast distance into space, far beyond all power of calculation, are the stars called the fixed stars.

They are called fixed, because they have no revolutionary motion, as the six worlds or planets have that I have been describing.

Those fixed stars continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, as the Sun does in the center of our system.

The probability, therefore, is that each of those fixed stars is also a Sun, round which another system of worlds or planets, though too remote for us to discover, performs its revolutions, as our system of worlds does round our central Sun.