88 SPECIAL RESULTS IN THE URANOLOGICAL PORTION 



little unfavourable to the growth of several kinds of vegeta- 

 tion, would have veiled from us the whole starry firmament. 

 Man's investigating spirit would then have been deprived of 

 all knowledge of the structure of the Universe. Creation 

 would have appeared to us limited either solely to our own 

 Globe, or comprising, at the utmost, the Sun and Moon be- 

 sides. Universal space would have seemed to us to be occu- 

 pied only by a triple star, consisting of Sun, Earth, and Moon. 

 Deprived of a great, and, indeed, of the most sublime part 

 of his ideas of the Cosmos, Man would have been without 

 the inducements, which have unceasingly stimulated him 

 during thousands of years to the solution of difficult and im- 

 portant problems, and have exercised so beneficial an influence 

 on the most brilliant advances in the higher departments of 

 mathematics. Before proceeding to the enumeration of 

 that which we have already attained, it may be permitted 

 to us thus briefly to glance at a danger from which we 

 have been preserved, and which might have opposed impass- 

 able physical barriers to the full intellectual development of 

 our race. 



In the consideration of the number of heavenly bodies 

 which fill space, three questions are to be distinguished : 

 How many fixed stars are seen with the naked eye ? how 

 many of these have been progressively catalogued, together 

 with the determination of their places (in latitude and longi- 

 tude, or in declination and right ascension) ? and what is 

 the number of stars, from the 1st to the 9th and 10th 

 magnitudes, ,which have been seen through telescopes in all 

 parts of the heavens ? These three questions admit of being 

 answered, approximately at least, according to the materials 

 already supplied by observation. Of a different class are 



