NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 141 



may perhaps feel humiliated by a result which reduces so far our 

 position in the material world ; but consider that man has succeeded 

 in extracting every thing from his own resources, whereby he is ele- 

 vated to the highest rank in the world of thought. 



We would remark that in the recent works of complete astral cata- 

 logues, we shall find that the number of stars visible to the naked eye 

 in a single hemisphere, namely the northern, is less than three thou- 

 sand. A certain result, and one, which notwithstanding will strike 

 with astonishment, on account of its smallness, those who have only 

 vaguely examined the sky on a beautiful winter night. The character 

 of this astonishment will change, if we proceed to the telescopic stars. 

 Carrying the enumeration to the stars of the fourteenth magnitude, 

 the last that are seen by our powerful telescopes, we shall find by an 

 estimate which will furnish us the minor limit, a number superior to 

 40,000,000, (40,000,000 of suns ! !) and the distance from the farthest 

 of them is such that the light would take from three to four thousand 

 years to traverse it. We are then, fully authorized to say, that the 

 luminous rays, those rapid couriers, bring* us, if I may so express 

 it, the very ancient history of these distant worlds. A photometric 

 experiment, of which the first indications exist in the Cosniotheoros 

 of Huygeus, an experiment resumed by Wollaston a short time before 

 his death, teaches us that 20,000 of stars the same size as Sirius, the 

 most brilliant of the firmament, would need to be agglomerated to shed 

 upon our globe a light equal to that of the sun. On reflecting upon 

 the well-known fact, that some of the double stars, are of very differ- 

 ent and dissimilar colors, our thoughts naturally turn to the inhabitants 

 of the obscure and revolving planetary bodies which apparently circu- 

 late around these suns ; and we would remark, not without real anxi- 

 ety for the works, the paintings, of the artists of these distant worlds, 

 that to a day lightened by a red light, succeeds not a night but a day, 

 equally brilliant, but illuminated only by a green light. 



But abandoning these speculations, however worthy they may be of 

 admiration, we shall come back to the chief question, which I have 

 proposed to treat in this account, to try, if possible, to establish a con- 

 nection between the physical nature of the sun and of the stars. We 

 have succeeded by the help of the polarizing telescope in determining 

 the nature of the substance which composes the solar photosphere, 

 because by reason of the great apparent diameter of the orb, we have 

 been able to observe separately the different points of its circumfer- 

 ence. If the sun were removed from us to a distance where its diam- 

 eter would appear as small to us as that of the stars, this method would 

 be inapplicable, the colored rays proceeding from the different points 

 of the circumference would then be intimately mixed, and, we have 

 said already, their mixture would be white. It appears, then, that we 

 must not apply to stars of imperceptible dimensions, the process which 

 so satisfactorily conducted us to the result in regard to the sun. There 

 are, however, some of these stars, which supply us with the means of 

 investigation. I allude to the changing stars. Astronomers have 

 remarked some stars whose brilliancy varies considerably ; there are 



