being mistaken, have greatly confounded me.' We now know that these observations, as well as those made soon after by Hevelius, though wrongly interpreted, were correct enough. Nay, we know that if either Galileo or Hevelius had been at the pains to reason out the meaning of the alternate visibility and disappearance of objects looking like attendant planets, they must have anticipated the discovery made in 1656 by Huyghens, that Saturn's globe is girdled about by a thin flat ring so vast that, if a score of globes like our earth were set side by side, the range of that row of worlds would be less than the span of the Saturnian ring system. There is a reference in Galileo's letter to the solar spots; 'Are the two lesser stars,' he says, 'consumed after the manner of the solar spots?' When he thus wrote the spots were among the myths or fables of astronomy, and an explanation was offered, by those who did not reject them utterly, which has taken its place among forsaken doctrines, those broken toys of astronomers. It is said that when Scheiner, himself a Jesuit, communicated to the Provincial of the Jesuits his discovery of the spots on the sun, the latter, a staunch Aristotelian, cautioned him not to see these things. 'I have read Aristotle's writings from beginning to end many times,' he said, 'and I can assure you I have nowhere found in them anything similar to what you mention' [amazing circumstances!] 'Go, therefore, my son, tranquillise yourself; be assured that what you take for spots on the sun are the faults of your glasses or your eyes.' As the idea was obviously inadmissible that a celestial body could be marked by spots, the theory was started that the dark objects apparently seen on the sun's body were in reality small planets revolving round the sun, and a contest arose for the possession of these mythical planets. Tardé maintained that they should be called _Astra Borbonia_, in honour of the royal family of France; but C. Malapert insisted that they should be called _Sidera Austriaca_. Meantime the outside world laughed at the spots, and their names, and the astronomers who were thought to have invented both. 'Fabritius puts only three spots,' wrote Burton in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' 'and those in the sun; Apelles 15, and those without the sun, floating like the Cyanean Isles in the Euxine Sea. Tardé the Frenchman hath observed 33, and those neither spots nor clouds as Galileus supposed, but planets concentric with the sun, and not far from him, with regular motions. Christopher Schemer' [a significant way of spelling Scheiner's name], 'a German Suisser Jesuit, divides them _in maculas et faculas_, and will have them to be fixed _in solis superficie_ and to absolve their periodical and regular motions in 27 or 28 dayes; holding withall the rotation of the sun upon his centre, and are all so confident that they have made schemes and tables of their motions. The Hollander censures