These words do not explain in any way the methods introduced by Gauss, but they give us some notion of the flavour of the work. Aided by these brilliant researches, the little planet was found on the last day of the year by Von Zach at Gotha, and on the next night, independently, by Olbers at Bremen. But, before this success, there had been an arduous search, which led to a curious consequence. Olbers had made himself so familiar with all the small stars along the track which was being searched for the missing body, that he was at once struck by the appearance of a stranger near the spot where he had just identified Ceres. At first he thought this must be some star which had blazed up to brightness; but he soon found that it also was moving, and, to the great bewilderment of the astronomical world, it proved to be another planet revolving round the sun at a distance nearly the same as the former. This was an extraordinary and totally unforeseen occurrence. The world had been prepared for _one_ planet; but here were _two_! [Sidenote: Hypothesis of many fragments.] The thought occurred to Olbers that they were perhaps fragments of a single body which had been blown to pieces by some explosion, and that there might be more of the pieces; and he therefore suggested as a guide for finding others that, since by the known laws of gravitation, bodies which circle round the sun return periodically to their starting-point, therefore all these fragments would in due course return to the point in the heavens where the original planet had exploded. Hence the search might be most profitably conducted in the neighbourhood of the spot where the two first fragments (which had been named Ceres and Pallas) had already been found. We now have good reason to believe that this view is a mistaken one, but nevertheless it was apparently confirmed by the discovery of two more bodies of the same kind, which were called Juno and Vesta; the second of these being found by Olbers himself after three years' patient work in 1807. Hence, although the idea of searching for a more or less definitely imagined planet was not new, although Bode had conceived it as early as 1785, and organised a search on this plan, three planets were actually found before the first success attending a definite search. Ceres, as already remarked, was found by a pure accident; and the same may be said of Pallas and Juno, though it may fairly be added that Pallas was actually contrary to expectation. MINOR PLANETS, 1801 TO 1850.