202 SPECIAL RESULTS IN THE URANOLOGICAL 



juxtaposition of the six principal stars in the Pleiades being 

 accidental, and thence inferred that their grouping must 

 rather be supposed to be founded on some peculiar relation 

 existing between them. He felt so certain of the existence 

 of luminous stars which move round each other, that he 

 proposed to apply these partial star-systems to the ingenious 

 solution of some astronomical problems. ( 335 ) 



The Manheim astronomer, Christian Mayer, has the great 

 merit of having first (1778) made the double stars a special 

 object of research by the sure path of actual observation. 

 The name which he unfortunately selected of " fixed-star 

 satellites," and the relations which he thought he recognised 

 between stars 2^ and 2 55' distant from Arcturus, ex- 

 posed him to the bitter attacks of his cotemporaries, and 

 among the number to the censure of the great and acute 

 mathematician, Nicolaus Puss. That dark bodies should 

 become visible by reflected light at such enormous distances 

 was indeed improbable. The results of observations care- 

 fully planned and executed were unfortunately disregarded, 

 because the proposed systematic explanation of the pheno- 

 mena was rejected ; and yet, in a paper written in his own 

 defence against Maximilian Hell, Director of the Imperial 

 Astronomical Observatory at Vienna, Mayer had expressly 

 said, "that the small stars which are so near large ones may 

 be either planets dark in themselves, but illuminated by 

 reflected light, or, that both bodies, i. e., the principal star 

 and its companion, may loth be self-luminous suns revolving 

 round each other/' Long after Mayer's death, that which is 

 important in his works has been gratefully and publicly 

 acknowledged by Struve and M'adler. In his two Memoirs, 

 entitled, ' ' Vertheidigung neuer Beobach-tungen von Fix- 



