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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
views respecting the habitudes of interstellar space, which 
have been formed from the study of the past labours of astro- 
nomers. I am fully sensible of the fact that to many I should 
seem better worthy of a hearing, if I nightly timed my watch 
by the stars, if I had spent a few years of labour in attempting 
to divide well-known double stars with inadequate telescopic 
power, or if I had in some other equally convincing manner 
exhibited my title to be regarded as a member of the now 
large array of amateur telescopists who work so hard and effect 
so little, and suppose themselves to be practical astronomers. 
Let me not be misunderstood, however. It is only because I 
wish to see amateur telescopists engaged on more useful re- 
searches, because I wish to see them devote a little more 
consideration than they do now to the thought of advancing 
astronomy, that I speak slightingly of the modes in which at 
present they are for the most part wasting time. We want all 
their help, and more, to advance the interest of our well-loved 
science ; all their telescopic appliances are too few for the 
work astronomers would like to see them doing. 
In studying the heavens, we have always this great diffi- 
culty, that we are looking at objects which are in reality at 
very different distances, but which appear to lie on the concave 
surface of a vast spherical enclosure. It seems almost hopeless 
to attempt by any processes of observation to obtain reliable 
estimates of the distances of all, save a very iew, of the fixed 
stars. It is not going too far to say that we are tolerably 
certain of the distance of only one star in the heavens — the 
star, Alpha Centauri. This being the case, and the heavens 
spangled with millions of objects at altogether unknown dis- 
tances, we must look carefully round us for evidence of another 
kind than that derived from actual measurement — we must 
look for signs of association, for definite laws of aggregation — 
if any such exist — and, if possible, we must apply that mode 
of inquiry from analogy which Sir William Herschel found 
in many instances so effective. 
And here, as I have mentioned the name of this great astro- 
nomer, to whom we owe the first systematic survey of the 
heavens, and the first attempt to reduce the results of observa- 
tion into law and order, I wish with, extreme diffidence, to point 
to what I cannot but consider an error of judgment in his 
selection of the principles which were to guide his survey of 
the heavens. It appears to me, that it would have been in all 
respects better had his first processes of stellar observation been 
directed to gauge the probability that this or that law of dis- 
tribution prevails in the heavens, rather than to the application 
of a system of star-gauging, which, if founded on a mistaken 
assumption, was necessarily but a waste of labour. It would 
