ASTRONOMY WITH AN OPERA-GLASS. 743 



noted them down carefully. Others, persuaded, with Rousseau, that 

 we are born good and pure, and that it is society that perverts us, went 

 into ecstasies "before the miraculous innocence of this paradisiacal 

 youth, the image of Adam before the fall." A homoeopathic physician, 

 Dr. Preu, discovered that infinitesimal dilutions had prodigious effects 

 on this primitive being. He only had to open his medicine-case or 

 uncork one of his vials to make the compliant Caspar fall into a swoon ; 

 and Hahnemann, hearing of the phenomenon, declared that the child 

 of Europe was the living demonstration of homoeopathy and the con- 

 fusion of its enemies. The same Dr. Preu, laying it down as an axiom 

 that " in a man who had passed his youth in a cellar the telluric prin- 

 ciple ought to prevail over the solar principle," employed days and 

 weeks in studying the action of metals and minerals on the nervous 

 system of Caspar. He declared that jasper chilled his arm to the 

 elbow, and chalcedony to the shoulder. Caspar lent himself obligingly 

 to these varied experiments. He was told : " You should feel this ; you 

 should feel that." His answer would be, " I feel it." And Dr. Preu 

 carefully registered his observations and analyses, as documents wor- 

 thy of passing down to the most distant posterity. If the impostor 

 had been unmasked, homoeopathists, moralists, philosophers, theolo- 

 gians, and jurists would have been covered with ineffaceable ridicule. 

 When they kept guard over the legend, it was to protect their self- 

 respect against scoffers. 



Herr von der Linde has more than proved that Caspar Hauser was 

 not a grand-duke. It appears further from his book that of all the 

 adventurers who have at any time imposed themselves on the attention 

 of the world and forced it to hear their name ; of all fraudulent he- 

 roes ; of all intruders upon fame, Caspar was the least interesting and 

 the nakedest of prestige and charm and grace. The greatest mark of 

 wisdom that he gave was to die at twenty years of age. — Translated 

 for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes. 



ASTRONOMY WITH AN OPERA-GLASS. 



THE STARS OF SPRING. 

 By GARBETT P. SERVISS. 



THERE was never a time when the heavens were studied by so 

 many amateur astronomers as at present. In every civilized 

 country many excellent telescopes are owned and used, often to very 

 good purpose, by persons who are not practical astronomers, but who 

 wish to see for themselves the marvels of the sky, and who occasionally 

 stumble upon something that is new even to professional star-gazers. 

 Yet, notwithstanding this activity in the cultivation of astronomical 

 studies, it is probably safe to assert that hardly one person in a hun- 



