But, interesting as it is to hear about the infancy,
maturity, and old age of suns, it would be still more so to hear about the infancy, maturity, and old age of planets ; and here, un- fortunately, astronomy gives us no light, except in relation to our own system. The planets of the other suns,—of Capella, for instance, and Sirius,—are invisible ; and as no creatures " such as we are " can exist in the suns themselves, we have no fresh light from other systems as to the possible conditions of " such creatures as we are in such a world as the present." Professor Huggins even intimated that our own solar system, instead of being constructed on the ordinary type of the stellar systems in general, may itself be rather exceptional in its conditions. It seems to be thought that the double suns which revolve about each other are very possibly more of the ordinary type of suns than such a system as ours, in which all the other subsidiary bodies are comparatively small as com- pared with the sun of which they are probably fragments.
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