jtoo NINETEENTH CENTURY. FT. HJ, 



German astronomer, named Gauss, set to work to calculate, 

 from the facts which Piazzi had given, whereabouts in the 

 heavens the planet ought then to be, and turning his tele- 

 scope to the point, there he found it ! This planet was 

 called Ceres ; it was very small compared to the other 

 planets, but the astronomers were satisfied at having rilled 

 up the supposed gap. 



Before two years had passed away, however, in the year 

 1802, Dr. Olbers of Bremen announced that he had found 

 another little planet near Ceres, which he called Pallas, and 

 in 1804 a third was found by another astronomer named 

 Harding, who called it Juno. It seemed very strange that 

 so many bodies should be moving round the sun at nearly 

 the same distance from it, and Dr. Olbers suggested that 

 they might perhaps be parts of one large planet which had 

 broken up into fragments. If this was so, he expected to 

 find more, and truly enough, in 1807 a fourth was dis- 

 covered, which he called Vesta. In 1845 and 1847 two 

 more were added to the number. Since then some have 

 been found every year; in May 1883 the number of these 

 small planets, or asteroids as they are called, moving round 

 the sun between Mars and Jupiter, had reached to 232, and 

 new ones are always being discovered. Ceres, the largest 

 of these, only measures abc^Ut 196 miles across, and when 

 it comes nearest to the earth does not look larger than a 

 star of the eighth magnitude. Whether they are really 

 fragments of a planet is not proved, and we have still a great 

 deal to learn about them. 



Encke's Comet, 1819. The next bodies of interest 

 which were discovered were two returning comets, each of 

 them remarkable for different reasons. The first of these 

 was observed in 1819, through the telescope at Marseilles, 

 by a Frenchman named Pons. It was very small, and is 



