322 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OF 



he makes no particular remark respecting the phases of 

 Yenus, as in Thomas Smith's Optics he is stated to have 

 done. 



These enlargements of cosmical knowledge, (the descrip- 

 tion of which cannot be kept entirely free from the unhappy 

 contests respecting claims of priority in discovery), like all 

 that belongs to physical astronomy, excited more general 

 interest than might otherwise have been the case, from the 

 invention of the telescope (1608) having occurred at a 

 period when popular attention had been roused by three 

 great and surprising events in the regions of space : I allude 

 to the sudden appearance and extinction of three new stars; 

 one in Cassiopea in 1572, one in Cygnus in 1600, and one in 

 the foot of Ophiuchus in 1604. All these surpassed in bright- 

 ness stars of the first magnitude; and that which Kepler 

 observed in Cygnus continued to shine in the vault of 

 heaven for twenty-one years, through the whole period of 

 Galileo V discoveries. Almost three centuries and a half 

 have since elapsed, and no new star of the first or second mag- 

 nitude has subsequently appeared ; for the remarkable cos- 

 mical event witnessed by Sir John Herschel in the southern 

 hemisphere in 1837, ( 494 ) was a great increase of luminous 

 intensity in a long known star of the second magnitude 

 (rj Argus), which had not until then been seen to be of 

 variable brightness. The writings of Kepler, and the sen- 

 sation produced at 'the present time by the appearance of 

 comets visible to the naked eye, enable us to comprehend 

 how powerfully the three new stars which appeared between 

 1572 and 1604 arrested curiosity how much they increased 

 the interest felt in astronomical discoveries, and what a 

 stimulus they afforded to imaginative combinations. Strik- 



