310 TRANSLATIONS AND SELECTED ARTICLES. 
to so small a matter our place in the material world. But let us 
reflect that man has arrived at this result by drawing all from his own 
peculiar fund, and we shall recognise in this his elevation to the 
most eminent rank in the domain of ideas. Astronomical investiga- 
tions may therefore well excuse a little vanity on our part. 
Would that it were permitted to me to follow modern astronomers 
in their immortal career across the multitude of suns that glitter in 
the firmament ! 
We should observe them, in the first place, determining with the aid- 
of their instruments the relative positions of these stars by cataloguing 
some hundred thousand of them. We know that the Elder Pliny 
was astonished that Hipparchus had endeavoured to observe 1022 of 
them, and that he compared this work to that of a deity! We should 
remark in some recent works complete enumerations which would show 
us that the number of stars visible to the naked eye in a single hemi- 
sphere—the Northern—is less than 3000—a result which is certain, 
but which, from its smallness, will strike with astonishment those who 
have vaguely examined the heavens in the fine winter nights. This 
astonishment would change its nature if we pass to the telescopic 
stars. In this case, carrying the enumeration as far as stars of the 
fourteenth magnitude, the last we can perceive in our most powerful 
telescopes, we should find, by a calculation which furnishes only an 
inferior limit, a number greater than forty millions (forty millions 
of suns!!), and the distance of the furthest of them would be such 
that light would require from three to four thousand years to traverse 
it. We should then be amply authorised to say that the rays of 
light, these messengers’ so rapid, bring to us, if we may so speak, the 
very ancient history of these distant worlds. 
A photometric investigation, of which the first hint is to be found 
in the Cosmotheoros of Huyghens, undertaken by Wollaston a short 
time before his death, would teach us that it would be necessary to 
unite twenty thousand stars like Sirius, the most brilliant of the fir- 
mament, in order to throw upon our globe a light equal to that of the 
sun. 
Guided by the genius of William Herschel, we should examine the 
stars which are apparently in contact, and this great astronomer would 
prove to us that these stars, coupled together in some manner, do not 
merely appear to us near to each other by an effect of perspective, but 
are really in mutual dependence, and revolve about their common 
