Nearest Fixed Star

Dr. Gill, Her Majesty's astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, lecturing at the Royal Institution, dealt with the difficult subject of fixed stars and their distance from the earth as demonstrated by recent researches. He says, "So far as all existing researches go, Centauri is the nearest of the fixed stars. To get some idea of its distance, we will imagine a railroad reaching from the earth to that luminary traveling at the rate of sixty miles per hour, it would take forty-eight million six hundred and sixty-three thousand years for the train to reach this nearest star." If this calculation be correct, it affords a new and most striking proof that "Truth is stranger than fiction."