* * *

If these methods have been clear to my readers, they may also be
interested perhaps in knowing the means employed in weighing the worlds.
The process is as simple and as clear as those of which we have been
speaking.

_Weighing the stars!_ Such a pretension seems Utopian, and one asks
oneself curiously what sort of balance the astronomers must have adopted
in order to calculate the weight of Sun, Moon, planets or stars.

Here, figures replace weights. Ladies proverbially dislike figures: yet
it would be easier for some society dame to weigh the Sun at the point
of her pen, by writing down a few columns of figures with a little care,
than to weigh a 12 kilogram case of fruit, or a dress-basket of 35
kilos, by direct methods.

Weighing the Sun is an amusement like any other, and a change of
occupation.

If the Moon were not attracted by the Earth, she would glide through the
Heavens along an indefinite straight line, escaping at the tangent. But
in virtue of the attraction that governs the movements of all the
Heavenly bodies, our satellite at a distance of 60 times the terrestrial
half-diameter revolves round us in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11-1/2
seconds, continually leaving the straight line to approach the Earth,
and describing an almost circular orbit in space. If at any moment we
trace an arc of the lunar orbit, and if a tangent is taken to this arc,
the deviation from the straight line caused by the attraction of our
planet is found to be 1-1/3 millimeter per second.

This is the quantity by which the Moon drops toward us in each second,
during which she accomplishes 1,017 meters of her orbit.

On the other hand, no body can fall unless it be attracted, drawn by
another body of a more powerful mass.

Beings, animals, objects, adhere to the soil, and weigh upon the Earth,
because they are constantly attracted to it by an irresistible force.

Weight and universal attraction are one and the same force.

On the other hand, it can be determined that if an object is left to
itself upon the surface of the Earth, it drops 4.90 meters during the
first second of its fall.

We also know that attraction diminishes with the square of the distance,
and that if we could raise a stone to the height of the Moon, and then
abandon it to the attraction of our planet, it would in the first second
fall 4.90 meters divided by the square of 60, or 3,600--that is, of
1-1/3 millimeters, exactly the quan