CENSUS OF THE SKY SAMPSON. 185 



That avenue which I would ask you to follow this evening is the 

 most direct, the least artificial, and one would say the driest of all — 

 mere enumeration, a census of the sky. But it is not dull. As I 

 ehall show you in a few minutes, the material de^ilt with is of com- 

 pelling beauty, and, as scientific people, I hope it may interest you 

 to have in brief review the considerable difficulties, instrumental and 

 of organization ; the many collateral questions that must be answered 

 before any confident, or even approximate, reply can be given to the 

 main question of how many stars there are and how they are dis- 

 tributed. And, finally, as British people, I think you feel a legiti- 

 mate pride to know that this great and unobtrusive work, of central 

 interest to astronomy, that I wish specially to describe to you is all 

 British (including therein the Transvaal Colony) in design and 

 execution; the plans made, cost provided, and very many of the 

 photographs taken by an amateur, the late Mr. Franklin-Adams, a 

 business man of London; the instrument designed by Mr. Dennis 

 Taylor, and constructed by him at Cooke's works at York ; the series 

 of photographs completed at the Union Observatory at Johannes- 

 burg; and the counts performed and discussion made at Greenwich 

 Observatory by Mr. Chapman and Mr. Melotte, two members of the 

 staff. [Specimens of the Franklin-Adams chart were shown (pis. 

 1-6).] 



You now see, more or less, the problem before you. To "give a 

 name to every fixed star " is a task that we are not likely to under- 

 take. The Arabs gave many of them proper names, which no doubt 

 had some meaning, more or less substantial, but now passed on to the 

 westerns with meaning, pronunciation, and accent alike in corrup- 

 tion, uncertainty, and disrepair, form a somewhat trying detail to 

 the conscientious astronomer. Ptolemy adopted in his list a crude 

 and picturesque description with reference to the asterism. Thus, in 

 Leo : " The one on his muzzle," " the one in his throat," " the one at 

 the tip of his front right claw," " the western one of the three on 

 his belly," " the one at his heart named Regulus." It is a troublesome 

 plan, even for the 1,000 stars of which he gives the places. Tycho, 

 who was only incidentally a stellar observer, using the stars to fix 

 his planets, carried on the method of Ptolemy. Not till the middle 

 of the seventeenth century did Bayer in his Uranometria, introduce 

 the device of attaching the Greek letters to stars in each asterism. 

 The advent of the telescope, with Hevelius and our own Flamsteed, 

 utterly outran any method except that of numbering. Lalande's 

 Histoire Celeste in 1801 contained 50,000; Argelander's Durchmus- 

 terung in 1847, upward of 300,000 in zones from the pole to Dec. 

 —10°. At each effort the object, if completeness was its aim, showed 

 more mountainlike. In 1879, at the instance of the Astronomische 

 Gesellschaft, Argelander's zones were revised by the cooperation of 



