t addition to the solar system that had
been made within historic times, and it created a veritable furor of
popular interest and enthusiasm. Incidentally King George was flattered
at having a world named after him, and he smiled on the astronomer, and
came with his court to have a look at his namesake. The inspection
was highly satisfactory; and presently the royal favor enabled the
astronomer to escape the thraldom of teaching music and to devote his
entire time to the more congenial task of star-gazing.

Thus relieved from the burden of mundane embarrassments, he turned with
fresh enthusiasm to the skies, and his discoveries followed one another
in bewildering profusion. He found various hitherto unseen moons of our
sister planets; he made special studies of Saturn, and proved that this
planet, with its rings, revolves on its axis; he scanned the spots on
the sun, and suggested that they influence the weather of our earth; in
short, he extended the entire field of solar astronomy. But very soon
this field became too small for him, and his most important researches
carried him out into the regions of space compared with which the span
of our solar system is a mere point. With his perfected telescopes he
entered abysmal vistas which no human eve ever penetrated before, which
no human mind had hitherto more than vaguely imagined. He tells us that
his forty-foot reflector will bring him light from a distance of "at
least eleven and three-fourths millions of millions of millions of
miles"--light which left its source two million years ago. The smallest
stars visible to the unaided eye are those of the sixth magnitude; this
telescope, he thinks, has power to reveal stars of the 1342d magnitude.

But what did Herschel learn regarding these awful depths of space and
the stars that people them? That was what the world wished to know.
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, had given us a solar system, but the stars
had been a mystery. What says the great reflector--are the stars points
of light, as the ancients taught, and as more than one philosopher of
the eighteenth century has still contended, or are they suns, as others
hold? Herschel answers, they are suns, each and every one of all the
millions--suns, many of them, larger than the one that is the centre of
our tiny system. Not only so, but they are moving suns. Instead of
being fixed in space, as has been thought, they are whirling in gigantic
orbits about some common centre. Is