REMARKS ON THE SMALL PLANETS. 203 



their own resources, far from the great observatories, and often Avith- 

 out the aid of the more exact class of charts, have added new 

 worlds to our system and sometimes raised themselves, by the num- 

 ber and brilliancy of their discoveries, to the level of the most dis- 

 tinguished astronomers. Among these laymen of science the first 

 rank belongs to our fellow countryman, M. Goldschmidt, who, but a 

 few days ago, introduced to us his fourteenth planet, the seventieth 

 of the group, and who has been, this year, the recipient of the gold 

 medal of the Astronomical Society of London. In offering this tes- 

 timonial, and in justification of its choice, the president of the so- 

 ciety took occasion to point out the scantiness of the means at M. 

 Goldschmidt' s disposal in comparison with the grandeur of the re- 

 sults which he had obtained . Lutetia, for instance, the first of his 

 acquisitions, has but the lustre of a star of the ninth or tenth magni- 

 tude, which is to say that its examination requires the closest atten- 

 tion on the part of astronomers who wish to observe it, even with 

 the help of the great meridian instruments of Paris and Greenwich. 

 And yet it was with a telescope, the aperture of which was but 

 twenty-three lines, that our cotemporary proceeded to the discovery 

 of this imperceptible object ; a telescope supported on the bars of a 

 chair and commanding but so limited a space of the heavens as might 

 be seen from the windows of a garret in the Pays Latin. 



The most fortunate competitors of M. Goldschmidt have been 

 MM. Hind and Luther, who have each discovered ten planets, while 

 M. de Gasparis has discovered eight, M. Chacornac six, M. Pogson, 

 four, and M. Ferguson three.* To M. Hencke, as stated before, we 

 owe two, and it is to him that the honor pertains of having first re- 

 entered on the path of discovery which had been closed for thirty- 

 eight years, and of having adopted, before any one else, the charts 

 of Berlin as the basis of his researches. Within a space of some few 

 days M. Temple associated his name with two of these minute stars, 

 and there are seven astronomers who have severally attained a single 

 success: MM. Graham, Searle, Laurent, Marth, Forster, Tuttle,t 

 and Schiaparelli. Thus, by adding the four older planets, we have 

 a total of seventy [three] asteroids actually known. 



IV. 



We cannot quit this subject without calling the attention of our 

 readers to a singular circumstance connected with it, and which has 

 been repeatedly taken notice of, especially of late, by the commission 

 of the Academy of Sciences for prizes in astronomy. The distribu- 

 tion of the discoveries of small planets over the last fourteen years 

 is strikingly unequal, and this inequality becomes still more remark- 

 able if we compare months and weeks. Often, after a barren year, 

 astronomers seem to wake up, and, in a space of some days, perceive 

 three or four unknown asteroids; then they seem to relapse into slum- 

 ber, and again, at the end of some months, rouse themselves for a 

 new outbreak of discoveries. To be convinced of this extraordinary 



* Of the National Observatory, Washington. 



t Mr. Tuttle, of Harvard, has discovered another. 



