the Earth from the Sun, while most stars 

 are very many times more remote. 



" Michell was the first 1 to propound,, 

 in the same Memoir, just views as to the 

 simple proportionality between the faint- 

 ness of the stars just visible in a telescope 

 and the area of its aperture, no other 

 circumstance being essentially concerned. 

 He initiated the application of this prin- 

 ciple to the estimation of the distribution 

 of the stars at different distances in the 

 depths of space, a task afterwards carried 

 out so tenaciously and brilliantly in the 

 'star-gauging' of Sir William Herschel. 

 He concluded from a discussion of proba- 

 bilities that the bright stars were more 

 numerous around our system than a uni- 

 form distribution in the celestial spaces 

 would permit ; and he inferred that most 

 of the bright stars that did not obviously 

 belong to star-groups were our nearer 

 neighbours, and constituted a stellar 

 system of which our own solar system is 



1 Grant, *p. at. p. 543. 



IOI 



