'[7] This, he added, was what all
true Muhammadans believed regarding the shooting of stars. He had
read nothing about them in the works of Plato, Aristotle,
Hippocrates, or Galen, all of which he had carefully studied, and
should be glad to learn from me what modern philosophers in Europe
thought about them.
I explained to him the supposed distance and bulk of the fixed stars
visible to the naked eye; their being radiant with unborrowed light,
and probably every one of them, like our own sun, the great centre of
a solar system of its own; embracing the vast orbits of numerous
planets, revolving around it with their attendant satellites; the
stars visible to the naked eye being but a very small portion of the
whole which the telescope had now made distinctly visible to us; and
those distinctly visible being one cluster among many thousand with
which the genius of Galileo, Newton, the Herschells, and many other
modern philosophers had discovered the heavens to be studded. I
remarked that the notion that these mighty suns, the centres of
planetary systems, should be made merely to be thrown at devils and
demons, appeared to us just as unaccountable as those of the Hindoos
regarding Indra's arrows.
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