lf-circle of change on February 24th of the following year, and
consequently exhibited herself to him in all her varying aspects. It
was the first time they had been looked upon by a human eye, since its
unaided powers do not enable it to discern them, although one
exception to this rule is said to have existed. This was the case of
the Swiss mathematician Gauss, who, when a child, on being shown the
crescent star through the telescope, exclaimed to his mother that it
"was turned wrong"; the inference being that he recognized the
reversal of the image in the field of the glass. If it were indeed so,
he deserves to rank with the Siberian savage, who described the
eclipses, or Jupiter's satellites; or the shoemaker of Breslau, who
could see and declare the positions of those minute orbs.

The phases exhibited to us by Venus are due to her moving in an orbit
within that of the earth, at one side of which she is between us and
the sun, while at the other this position is exactly reversed. We may
compare her to a performer in a great celestial circus, lit by a
central chandelier, and ourselves to spectators in an external ring,
from which we see her at one time facing us with the light full on
her, at the opposite point in complete shadow, and at the intermediate
ones in varying degrees of illumination according to our changing
views of her. The same illustration may serve to show why Venus is
brightest, not when full, since she is then beyond the sun, and at the
farthest possible point from us, but when she approaches us at
inferior conjunction, more nearly by over one hundred and thirty
million miles, and still shows us a crescent of her illuminated
surface, before passing into the last phase of total obscuration. When
actually nearest to us she is absolutely invisible, being then, like
the new moon, between us and the sun. Her varying degrees of
brilliancy, even when in the same phase, are thus accounted for by her
alternate retreat from and advance towards us as she circles round the
sun. Completing, as she does, her revolution in about seven months and
a half, she would of course go through the whole series of her
metamorphoses in that time, were the earth, from which we observe
them, a fixed point. Their protraction instead, over a term of five
hundred and eighty-four days, or more than nineteen months, is due to
the simultaneous motion of the earth in the same direction, over her
larger orbit in a longer period, causi