l8o CELESTIAL MEASURINGS AND WEIGHINGS. 



sources of positive enjoyment which are not less real 

 because they are intellectual, or less valuable because 

 they cannot be appropriated or bartered in exchange : 

 but which yet cannot be attained by mere intellectual 

 aspiration or effort ; but require for their production and 

 dissemination appliances and means of a refined charac- 

 ter, and combinations of a recondite kind ; such as only 

 an advanced stage of material as well as intellectual pro- 

 gress can furnish. Such a piece of intellectual wealth is 

 the solution of that great enigma (such, at least, in all 

 former time) of the distance of the stars, a problem 

 which has yielded, at length, to the delicacy and refine- 

 ment of astronomical observation, during the lapse of 

 the last thirty years ; combined with and acting through 

 the marvels of mechanical skill and workmanship which 

 are now obtainable. That distance is now no longer 

 the hazy and absolutely indefinite matter of conjecture 

 which it was (to go no farther back) in the time of New- 

 ton, or even in the middle of the last century. Of some, 

 at least, of them it can be said with every reasonable 

 assurance of probability, that their distance is known 

 within an eighth or a ninth part of the truth, one way or 

 the other ; and of several, that we can arrange them in 

 order of distance, nearer and more remote, with little or 

 no presumption of mistake. A stepping-stone is thus laid 

 for another upward struggle towards the infinite to the 

 nebulae, the remotest objects of which we have any know- 



a^e^os, Gr.), expresses -wealth in its largest sense of general abuncL 

 ance and well-being. Ploutos (TrXoi/ros, Plutus), riches, in the more 

 restricted sense of the precious metals, or, at the utmost, of exchange- 

 able value. 



