It will thus be evident that Herr Schwabe had the courage to enter upon a line of investigation which others had practically condemned as likely to lead nowhere, and that his discovery was quite contrary to expectation. It is a lesson to us that not even the most unlikely line of work is to be despised; for the outcome of Schwabe's work was the first step in the whole series of discoveries which have gradually built up the modern science of Solar Physics, which occupies so deservedly large a part of the energies of, for instance, the great observatory attached to the University of Chicago. [Sidenote: Schwabe's announcement.] It has been our practice to recall the actual words in which the discoverer himself stated his discovery, and I will give the original modest announcement of Schwabe, though for convenience of those who do not read German I will attempt a rough translation. He had communicated year by year the results of his daily counting of the solar spots to the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, and after he had given ten years' results in this way he collected them together, but he made no remark on the curious sequence which they undoubtedly showed at that time. Waiting patiently six years for further material, in 1843 he ventured to make his definite announcement as follows:--"From my earlier observations, which I have communicated annually to this journal, there was manifest already a certain periodicity of sun-spots; and the probability of this being really the case is confirmed by this year's results. Although I gave in volume 15 the total numbers of groups for the years 1826-1837, nevertheless I will repeat here a complete series of all my observations of sun-spots, giving not only the number of groups, but also the number of days of observation, and further the days when the sun was free from spots. The number of groups alone will not in itself give sufficient accuracy for determination of a period, since I have convinced myself that when there are a large number of sun-spots the number will be reckoned somewhat too small, and when few sun-spots, the number somewhat too large; in the first case several groups are often counted together in one, and in the second it is easy to divide a group made up of two component parts into two separate groups. This must be my excuse for repeating the early catalogue, as follows:--