Surely not (says Sir John Herschel) to illuminate _our_ nights, which
an additional moon of the thousandth part of the size of our own
would do much better; nor to sparkle as a pageant void of meaning and
reality, and bewilder us among vain conjectures. Useful, it is true,
they are to man as points of exact and permanent reference; but he must
have studied astronomy to little purpose, who can suppose man to be the
only object of his Creator’s care, or who does not see in the vast and
wonderful apparatus around us provision for other races of animated
beings. The planets derive their light from the sun; but that cannot be
the case with the stars. These doubtless, then, are themselves suns;
and may perhaps, each in its sphere, be the presiding centre round
which other planets, or bodies of which we can form no conception from
any analogy offered by our own system, are circulating.[19]