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Amazing discoveries to the layman were those announced yesterday by the University observatory at Arequipa, Peru The measurements of the Magellanic cloud show it to be a separate galaxy from ours, with an entirely new system of stars to be explored. With the comforting assurance of the existence of two galaxies of stars, we can consider these to be an indefinite number: and the Milky Way, our own galaxy, on the edge of which we occupy a rustic backwoods position is nothing more than a trifling part of the Universe. After all, the Milky Way is a finite body, and what is anything finite in the midst of infinity?

Years ago. Sir John Herschel observing the Magellanic clouds in the Southern skies believed them to be "large tracts and patches of nebulosity in every stage of resolution, from light . . . to perfectly separated stars." Since his time other facts have indicated the Magellanic clouds to be another group such as the Milky Way and now Professor Bailey's work at Arequipa has fixed even more accurately man's place in the Universe.

Minute as this position appears, there is no reason to be overcome with dizziness in reading the figures. In mathematics and philosophy "infinity" is referred to so often and so casually that it becomes a commonplace. And infinity is far more difficult to comprehend than a comparatively small number like 660,000,000,000,000,000 miles, the distance to the Magellanic Cloud at present. It would take 1,130,000,000,000 years of constant walking to cover the distance, or--in more familiar terms,--a Dudley Street car might make it in 1,134,000,000,000 years. But most astronomers consider the idea impractical, as the Magellanic Cloud is moving away from us 150 miles every second. By the time the Dudley Street car reached the Cloud's present location, the galaxy would be 556 quintillion miles further on its way. A rocket leaving the earth at 540,000 miles an hour would never catch this baffling, Cloud, but if the speed were kept up, it would "just about hold its own."

All of these figures may mean much or little, according to the point of view. At all events, the Harvard station at Arequipa has mapped out a broad field fur future exploration. The question whether the house of our next door neighbor, Mars, only a fraction of a light year away, is tenanted, is still unsettled; and now we are given a whole new system to play with, a system 15,000 light years in diameter, with hundreds of suns ten thousand times as bright as ours, and a free-for-all guessing contest as to the number of planets, invisible to us, encircling each sun.