24 UNSEEN STARS. 



Brightest it shines, but ominous, and dire 

 Disease portends to miserable man." . . 



To sum up : the figurative grouping of the stars, the variety 

 of their luminous magnificence, their position towards Polaris, 

 the determination of that position by the longitudinal circles 

 passing through the axis of the world, and twisted perpendi- 

 cularly to this axis by the circles parallel to the Equator, 

 such is the aggregate of the elements which must, at 

 a very early period, have presided over the enumeration 

 of those sparkling points, each of which is the centre of a 

 system. 



Finally, are there any stars which the eye cannot perceive ? 

 Such a question would never have been propounded to the 

 ancients. And why? Because no reasoning would have 

 drawn from them an admission that it was possible by artificial 

 means to enlarge the range of our eyesight. They would have 

 deemed it madness to pretend to improve and develope what 

 is not of human creation ; the visual apparatus, as it is be- 

 stowed on us by nature, they supposed to be the most perfect 

 instrument which man could imagine. And, in truth, nothing 

 could fairly be objected to this way of looking at things. 



The 48 constellations (21 northern, 12 zodiacal, and 15 

 austral) indicated by Ptolemceus, contain a total of 1026 stars, 

 whose relative positions had been determined by Hipparchus. 

 To undertake an enumeration of the stars, and to transmit the 

 result to posterity, appeared to Pliny an audacity before which 



