observed directing his men as collectedly as on one of the ordinary occurrences of life. The speculum has been formed into a telescope of fifty feet local length, and is established between two walls of castellated architecture, against one of which the tube bears when in the meridian. It is no slight triumph of ingenuity, that this enormous instrument may be moved about and regulated by one man’s arm with perfect ease and certainty. To return to Herschel. No addition had been made of any new body to the universe since Cassini discovered a fifth satellite in the train of Saturn. Nearly a century had elapsed without any further progress of that kind. The solar system, including the planets, satellites, and Halley’s comet, consisted of eighteen bodies when Herschel turned his attention to astronomy; but, before his career of observation terminated, he increased the number to twenty-seven, thus making the system half as large again as he found it, as to the number of its constituents—a brilliant recompense, but not an over-payment, considering the immense expenditure of time, and toil, and care. A primary planet with six moons, and two more satellites about Saturn, composed the reward. It was on the 13th of March, 1781, that, turning a telescope of high magnifying power—though not his gigantic instrument—to the constellation Gemini, he perceived a cluster of stars at the foot of Castor, and one in particular, which sensibly increased in diameter, while the rest of the stars remained unaltered. Two nights afterward, its place was changed, which originated the idea of its being a cometary body; an opinion embraced upon the continent when attention was called to it, but soon dispelled by clear evidence of its planetary nature. The new planet was named after the reigning monarch by the discoverer, but received his own name from astronomers, which was finally exchanged for the Uranus of heathen mythology, the oldest of the gods, the fabled father of Saturn and the grandsire of Jupiter—referring to the position of the planet beyond the orbits of the bodies named after the latter. By this discovery, the extent of the system was at once doubled; for the path of the stranger lies as far beyond what had been deemed its extreme confine, as that limit is removed from the sun. The first moment of his “attack” upon Saturn, upon completing the forty-feet reflector, he saw a sixth satellite, and a seventh moon later. But Herschel realized his most surprising results, and derives his greatest glory, from the observation of the sidereal heavens. The resolution of nebulæ and the Milky Way into an infinite number of stars—the discovery of new nebulæ of various forms, from the light luminous cloud to the nebulous star—of double and multiple stars—of the smaller revolving round the greater in the binary systems: these were some of his revelations to the world, as night after night, from dewy eve till break of dawn, he gauged the firmament. Caroline