w the limits of my land,
Here! Here! then I mark the ground."

ON THEOLOGICAL PARADOXERS.

Among the paradoxers are some of the theologians who in their own organs of
the press venture to criticise science. These may hold their ground when
they confine themselves to the geology of long past periods and to general
cosmogony: for it is the tug of Greek against Greek; and both sides deal
much in what is grand when called _hypothesis_, petty when called
_supposition_. And very often they are not conspicuous when they venture
upon things within knowledge; {317} wrong, but not quite wrong enough for a
Budget of Paradoxes. One case, however, is destined to live, as an instance
of a school which finds writers, editors, and readers. The double stars
have been seen from the seventeenth century, and diligently observed by
many from the time of Wm. Herschel, who first devoted continuous attention
to them. The year 1836 was that of a remarkable triumph of astronomical
prediction. The theory of gravitation had been applied to the motion of
binary stars about each other, in elliptic orbits, and in that year the two
stars of [gamma] Virginis, as had been predicted should happen within a few
years of that time--for years are small quantities in such long
revolutions--the two stars came to their nearest: in fact, they appeared to
be one as much with the telescope as without it. This remarkable
turning-point of the history of a long and widely-known branch of astronomy
was followed by an article in the _Church of England Quarterly Review_ for
April 1837, written against the Useful Knowledge Society. The notion that
there are any such things as double stars is (p. 460) implied to be
imposture or delusion, as in the following extract. I suspect that I myself
am the _Sidrophel_, and that my companion to the maps of the stars, written
for the Society and published in 1836, is the work to which the writer
refers:

"We have forgotten the name of that Sidrophel who lately discovered that
the fixed stars were not single stars, but appear in the heavens like soles
at Billingsgate, in pairs; while a second astronomer, under the influence
of that competition in trade which the political economists tell us is so
advantageous to the public, professes to show us, through his superior
telescope, that the apparently single stars are really three. Before such
wondrous mandarins of science, how continually must _homunculi_ like
ourselves keep in