Such estimates, too, were aided by collateral observations of the stars. Let any one look out upon the heavens some clear night at the commencement of the year, and he can not help being struck with the position as well as the brilliancy of certain constellations. Over head are the Pleiades, the lone Aldebaran, Perseus, and Capella. Coming up the eastern sky are Orion, Gemini, Sirius, the Lesser Dog. Descending in the western are Andromeda, Pegasus, Capricornus, the Southern Fish. While low down toward the setting horizon are the Harp, the Eagle, and the Swan. Two weeks later, at the same time in the evening, he will find them all farther westward. In a month the change will be still more marked. After three months, those that before were just rising are on the meridian, and those that were then on the meridian are now setting. In six months, an entirely new host of stars will adorn the firmament, and at the end of a year, all the same phenomena will be found to have come round again. Our minuteness of detail may seem like trifling in an age so scientific as this; but it is astonishing how much our science is the science of books, and how little, after all, especially in astronomy, there is of personal acquaintance with the objects whose laws we know so well in theory. How many understand thoroughly the doctrine of transits and parallaxes, and even the more difficult laws of celestial influences, as laid down in scientific treatises, and yet, to save their lives, could not tell us what stars are now overhead, or what planets are now visible in our nightly heavens. They have read of Jupiter, they know the dimensions of Jupiter, and have even calculated the movements of Jupiter, it may be, but Jupiter himself they never saw. They would be surprised, perhaps, to discover, by actual sight, how much, in respect to position and appearance, our wintry constellations differ from those that are visible in summer; although night after night, for years and years, the brilliant phenomena have been passing over their heads, and silently, yet most eloquently, inviting their observation. This should not be so. The names and locations of the stars should ever be a part of astronomical instruction. We should learn them, if only for their classical reminiscences--for the sublime pleasure of having such a theme for contemplation in our evening walks. How easy, in this way, to fill the heavens with life, when we are led to regard them no longer as an unmeaning collection of glittering points, or what is scarcely better, a mere diagram for the illustration of scientific abstractions, but stored with remembrances of the older days of our world--the old religion, the old mythology, the old philosophy pictured on the sky--the old heroes, and heroines, and heroic events, transferred to the stars, and still shining in immortal splendor above us.