THE ORIGIN OF NEW STARS. 1:33 
see that these stars, or sunlighted bodies and planets around 
them, only get a two-thousand millionth part of the hight 
and are not seen. The brilliant objects that we see, though 
they are overwhelmingly numerous, yet they must be 
absolutely as nothing in comparison with the myriads of 
dark objects which are totally invisible to us, except when 
certain very remarkable circumstances arise. The probability 
is, When we look at the stars, we do not see a thousandth, 
part of the actual amount of matter up there, because it 
is much more usual for. a body to be dark than it 
is for that body to be bright. Brightness is a temporary 
stage, and darkness is a stage of indefinitely long duration. 
When we look up at the heavens, I sometimes think that 
the view we get may be paralleled with that a being 
from some other part would get of this city of London if, 
instead of looking at us in daylight, he came and stood on 
the Monument, at night, and looked down on the sleeping 
city. What would he see? He would not see the buildings, 
and of the wondrous life of that city he would see nothing— 
merely lights here and there dissipating the gloom slightly. 
If that being were to go away thinking he had seen London, 
simply because he had seen those lights, how very in- 
adequate would be his knowledge. In a somewhat similar 
way we must interpret the lights in heaven, It is the dark 
things that are most numerous, and we have only become 
acquainted with a very few. Occasionally it happens that 
by some remarkable incident in the heavens, the dark 
objects, or some of them, become known to us. We are no 
longer left merely to conjecture as to their existence, but 
they became actually apparent; and such an instance we 
found in that new star which broke out last February in 
the constellation of Perseus. For the examination of stars 
in these modern days, methods are provided by the spec- 
troscope. We now analyze them in a way which was 
impossible before the spectrum analysis was available. I will 
illustrate this by showmg some photographs that were taken 
by Father Sidgreaves of Stonyhurst College, to whose 
kindness I am so greatly indebted. 
I had the privilege of looking at the spectrum of this new 
star in Perseus, and it was a most striking sight. If there 
were nothing else than that spectrum, if nobody knew any- 
thing further about the history of the star he would at once 
have said, “Surely this is a star of the most remarkable 
character and quite unlike ordinary stars”; for there are 
