76 Double Stars and the 



Scarpa, and received from the Royal Society of London a 

 gold medal for the discovery of his condenser. In 1801 he 

 was at Paris, where he explained his pile ; the Institute de- 

 creed to him a gold medal as a testimony of its admiration, 

 and he was placed among the number of the eight foreign 

 associates of that learned body. Advantageous otiers were 

 afterwards made to draw him to the great capitals, but he 

 preferred his country to the brilliant prospects which were 

 presented to him ; he was no less, on this account, the Euro- 

 pean savant, so true it is, that true genius has no need of a 

 large theatre, to be known and appreciated to its just extent. 



Volta, aged and weary, retired to Como, where he contin- 

 ued to occupy himself with philosophy, and particularly with 

 meteorology. A slow fever which had for a long time been 

 weakening him, carried him off on the 5th of March last, at 

 the age of eighty two years. 



This is all we learn from the Italian journal relative to the 

 life of this great philosopher of whom science is now de- 

 prived. We cannot help deploring on this occasion another 

 loss which science sustained in the same year. By a sad co- 

 incidence, the same month, and even the same day which 

 terminated the life of Volta, were the month and the day 

 which witnessed the death of Laplace. A singular concur- 

 rence between two of the greatest geniuses of the age, so 

 different otherwise, in the paths which they followed in the 

 pursuit of science ! If one by his inventive genius, has open- 

 ed a new career to the sagacity of the human mind, the 

 other, by a force of conception which raised him to the most 

 sublime generalizations, has traced a route which no person, 

 perhaps, will attempt to follow. The theory of the world 

 begun by Newton can expect no future Laplace ; that of 

 electricity which owes its great progress to Volta, has a right 

 to ask a "Laplace. — A. D. L. R. Bib. Univ. Juillet, 1827. 



Art. X. — Double Stars and the Order of the Starry Fir- 

 mament. 



(Translated for this Journal by Prof. John Griscom.) 



In the year 1824 the observatory of Dorpat in Livonia, 

 was furnished with the grand achromatic Telescope of Fraun- 

 liofer, the most remarkable instrument of the kind ever con- 



