merely to fill a gap in a numerical series.[203] Unabashed by speculative scorn, Bode had scarcely read Piazzi's letter when he concluded that it referred to the precise body in question. The news spread rapidly, and created a profound sensation, not unmixed with alarm lest this latest addition to the solar family should have been found only to be again lost. For by that time Piazzi's moving star was too near the sun to be any longer visible, and in order to rediscover it after conjunction a tolerably accurate knowledge of its path was indispensable. But a planetary orbit had never before been calculated from such scanty data as Piazzi's observation afforded;[204] and the attempts made by nearly every astronomer of note in Germany to compass the problem were manifestly inadequate, failing even to account for the positions in which the body had been actually seen, and _à fortiori_ serving only to mislead as to the places where, from September, 1801, it ought once more to have become discernible. It was in this extremity that the celebrated mathematician Gauss came to the rescue. He was then in his twenty-fifth year, and was earning his bread by tuition at Brunswick, with many possibilities, but no settled career before him. The news from Palermo may be said to have converted him from an arithmetician into an astronomer. He was already in possession of a new and more general method of computing elliptical orbits; and the system of "least squares," which he had devised though not published, enabled him to extract the most probable result from a given set of observations. Armed with these novel powers, he set to work; and the communication in November of his elements and ephemeris for the lost object revived the drooping hopes of the little band of eager searchers. Their patience, however, was to be still further tried. Clouds, mist, and sleet seemed to have conspired to cover the retreat of the fugitive; but on the last night of the year the sky cleared unexpectedly with the setting in of a hard frost, and there, in the north-western part of Virgo, nearly in the position assigned by Gauss to the runaway planet, a strange star was discerned by Von Zach[205] at Gotha, and on a subsequent evening--the anniversary of the original discovery--by Olbers at Bremen. The name of Ceres (as the tutelary goddess of Sicily) was, by Piazzi's request, bestowed upon this first known of the numerous, and probably all but innumerable family of the minor planets.