ushed
into my garden to seek a cooler atmosphere. As my door opens towards the
east, the first object that met my view was the Northern Crown. My
attention was at once arrested by the sight of a strange star outside
the crown' (that is, outside the circlet of stars forming the diadem,
not outside the constellation itself). The new star 'was then certainly
quite as bright--I rather thought more so--as its neighbour Alphecca,'
the chief gem of the crown. 'I was so much struck with its appearance,
that I exclaimed to those indoors, "Why, here is a new comet!'" He made
a diagram of the constellation, showing the place of the new star
correctly. Unfortunately, Mr. Walter does not state why he is so
confident, a year after the event, that it was on the 12th of May, and
not on the 13th, that he noticed the new star. If he fixed the date only
by the star's appearance as a second-magnitude star, his letter proves
nothing; for we know that on the 13th it was still shining as brightly
as Alphecca, though on the 14th it was perceptibly fainter.

[34] The velocity of three or four miles per second inferred by the
elder Struve must now be regarded (as I long since pointed out would
prove to be the case) as very far short of the real velocity of our
system's motion through stellar space.

[35] M. Cornu's observations are full of interest, and he deserves
considerable credit for his energy in availing himself of the few
favourable opportunities he had for making them. But he goes beyond his
province in adding to his account of them some remarks, intended
apparently as a reflection on Mr. Huggins's speculations respecting the
star in the Northern Crown. '_I_,' says M. Cornu, 'will not try to form
any hypothesis about the cause of the outburst. To do so would be
unscientific, and such speculations, though interesting, cumber science
wofully.' This is sheer nonsense, and comes very ill from an observer
whose successes in science have been due entirely to the employment of
methods of observation which would have had no existence had others been
as unready to think out the meaning of observed facts as he appears to
be himself.

[36] The same peculiarity has been noticed since the discovery of the
dark ring, the space within that ring being observed by Coolidge and G.
Bond at Harvard in 1856 to be apparently darker than the surrounding
sky.

[37] I cannot understand why Mr. Webb, in his interesting little work,
_Celestial Objects for Co