Some recent discussions of the constitution of the sun have turned in part upon what is known as the sun’s proper motion in space.  This is one of the most surprising and interesting things that science has ever brought to light, and yet it is something of which comparatively few persons have any knowledge.  It is customary to look upon the sun as if it were the center of the universe, an immovable fiery globe around which the earth and other planets revolve while it remains fixed in one place.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The sun is, in fact, the most wonderful of travelers.  He is flying through space at the rate of not less than a hundred and sixty millions of miles in a year, and the earth and her sister planets are his fellow voyagers, which, obeying his overpowering attraction, circle about him as he advances.  In other words, if we could take up a position in open space in advance of the sun, we should see him rushing toward us at the rate of some 450,000 miles a day, chased by his whole family of shining worlds and the vast swarms of meteoric bodies which obey his attraction.

The general direction of this motion of the solar system has been known since the time of Sir William Herschel.  It is toward the constellation Hercules, which, at this season, may be seen in the northeastern sky at 9 o’clock in the evening.  As the line of this motion makes an angle of fifty odd degrees with the plane of the earth’s orbit, it follows that the earth is not like a horse at a windlass, circling around the sun forever in one beaten path, but like a ship belonging to a fleet whose leader is continually pushing its prow into unexplored waters.

The path of the earth through space is spiral, so that it is all the time advancing into new regions along with the sun.  She is on a boundless voyage of discovery, and her human crew are born and die in widely separated tracts of space.  Think of the distance over which the travels of the sun have borne the earth only since the beginning of human history!  Six thousand years ago the earth and sun were about a million millions of miles further from the stars in Hercules than they are to-day.  Columbus and his contemporaries lived when the earth was in a region of the universe more than sixty thousand millions of miles from the place where it is now, so that since his time the whole human race has been making a voyage through space, in comparison with which his longest voyage was as the footstep of a fly.

Thus the great events in the history of the world may be said to have occurred in different parts of the universe.  An almost inconceivable distance separates the spot which the earth occupied in the time of Alexander from that which it occupied when Caesar invaded Gaul.  The sun and the earth have wandered so far from their birthplace that the mind staggers in the attempt to guess at the stupendous distance which now probably separates them from it.  It may be that the motion of the solar system is orbital and that our sun and many of the stars, his fellow suns, are revolving around some common center, but if so, no means has yet been devised of detecting the form or dimensions of his orbit.  So far as we can see, the sun is moving in a straight line.