358 
ARE THERE ANY FIXED STARS? 
r»Y RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A., F.R.A.S., 
Author of Saturn and its System,” ^^Halfhours with the 
Stars,” &c. &c. 
[PLATE LI.] 
D URINGt the last few years astronomers have been attacking 
questions which seem, at first sight, far beyond the range 
of the human intellect, or of the instrumental appliances which 
human ingenuity can devise. A marked contrast, indeed, is to 
be distinguished between the inquiries which have been made 
within the last decade and the most valuable discoveries of all 
previous times. Not one of the results which had rewarded the 
labours of scientific men up to the middle of the present 
century would have seemed incredible to Francis Bacon had 
it been predicted to him ; nay, there is scarcely one of them 
which is not more or less distinctly shadowed forth in that 
strange and little-read work of his, the “ Sylva Sylvanum.” But 
even he, daring as were his conceptions and hopeful as were his 
views of the powers of that method of research which he incul- 
*cated, would probably have smiled with contempt had the idea 
of analysing the sun or the fixed stars been mooted in his 
presence. The Frenchman who lately brought before the Im- 
perial Academy at Paris the absurd proposition that our astro- 
nomers and physicists should make signals to the inhabitants 
of Mars and Jupiter scarcely appears a greater dreamer to us 
than any one would have appeared to Bacon who put forward a 
notion seemingly so preposterous. 
At first sight it may seem to many that the subject I have 
now chiefly to deal with — the determination, namely, by ourastro- 
noiners, of the motions of recess or approach which the fixed stars 
may possess — does not belong to the category of those researches 
which appear altogether hopeles.<J. Yet when the true nature of 
the problem is understood, a different view will certainly be 
mlopted. It will be well to look at the subject of the stellar 
motions in this way, to consider the difficulties which seem to 
