Giordano Bruno was the first to set the suns of space in motion; but in imagination only. His daring surmise was, however, confirmed in 1718, when Halley announced[3] that Sirius, Aldebaran, Betelgeux, and Arcturus had unmistakably shifted their quarters in the sky since Ptolemy assigned their places in his catalogue. A similar conclusion was reached by J. Cassini in 1738, from a comparison of his own observations with those made at Cayenne by Richer in 1672; and Tobias Mayer drew up in 1756 a list showing the direction and amount of about fifty-seven proper motions,[4] founded on star-places determined by Olaus Römer fifty years previously. Thus the stars were no longer regarded as "fixed," but the question remained whether the movements perceived were real or only apparent; and this it was not yet found possible to answer. Already, in the previous century, the ingenious Robert Hooke had suggested an "alteration of the very system of the sun,"[5] to account for certain suspected changes in stellar positions; Bradley in 1748, and Lambert in 1761, pointed out that such apparent displacements (by that time well ascertained) were in all probability a combined effect of motions both of sun and stars; and Mayer actually attempted the analysis, but without result. On the 13th of August, 1596, David Fabricius, an unprofessional astronomer in East Friesland, saw in the neck of the Whale a star of the third magnitude, which by October had disappeared. It was, nevertheless, visible in 1603, when Bayer marked it in his catalogue with the Greek letter Omicron, and was watched, in 1638-39, through its phases of brightening and apparent extinction by a Dutch professor named Holwarda.[6] From Hevelius this first-known periodical star received the name of "Mira," or the Wonderful, and Boulliaud in 1667 fixed the length of its cycle of change at 334 days. It was not a solitary instance. A star in the Swan was perceived by Janson in 1600 to show fluctuations of light, and Montanari found in 1669 that Algol in Perseus shared the same peculiarity to a marked degree. Altogether the class embraced in 1782 half-a-dozen members. When it is added that a few star-couples had been noted in singularly, but it was supposed accidentally, close juxtaposition, and that the failure of repeated attempts to measure stellar parallaxes pointed to distances _at least_ 400,000 times that of the earth from the sun,[7] the picture of sidereal science, when the last quarter of the eighteenth century began, is practically complete. It included three items of information: that the stars have motions, real or apparent; that they are immeasurably remote; and that a few shine with a periodically variable light. Nor were these scantily collected facts ordered into any promise of further development. They lay at once isolated and confused before the inquirer. They needed to be both multiplied and marshalled, and it seemed as if centuries of patient