[In old time there was a collection made every year for the doctors, masters, and beadles, and this was called _collecta_ or _culet_: the latter word is now used for a customary fee paid to the beadles. "I suppose," says Hearne, "that when this was gathered for the doctors and masters it was only for such doctors and masters as taught and read to scholars, of Which sort there was a vast number in old time, and such a collection was therefore made, that they might proceed with the more alacrity, and that their dignity might be better supported."--Appendix to _Hist. Rob. de Avesbury_.] * * * * * Replies. THE ASTEROIDS OR RECENTLY DISCOVERED LESSER PLANETS. (Vol. vii., p. 211.; Vol. viii., p. 601.) QUÆSTOR has asked me a question to which I will not refuse a reply. If he thinks that the breaking up of a planetary world is a mere fancy, he may consult Sir John Herschel's _Astronomy_, § 434., in Lardner's series, ed. 1833, in which the supposition was treated as doubtful, and farther discoveries were declared requisite for its confirmation; and Professor Mitchell's _Discoveries of Modern Astronomy_, Lond. 1850, pp. 163-171., where such discoveries are detailed, and the progress of the proof is narrated and explained. It may be briefly stated as follows:--In the last century, Professor Bode discovered the construction of a regular series of numbers, in coincidence with which the distances of all the known planets from the sun had been arranged by their Creator, saving one exception. Calling the earth's solar distance 10, the next numbers in the series are 16, 28, 52. The distances answering to 16 and 52, on this scale, are respectively occupied by the planets Mars and Jupiter; but the position of 28 seemed unoccupied. It was not likely that the Creator should have left the methodical order of his work incomplete. A few patient observers agreed, therefore, to divide amongst themselves that part of the heavens which a planet revolving at the vacant distance might be expected to traverse; and that each should keep up a continuous examination of the portion assigned to him. And the result was the discovery by Piazzi, in 1801, of a planet revolving at the expected solar distance, but so minute that the elder Herschel computed its diameter to be no more than 163 miles. The discovery of a second by Olbers, in the {37} following year, led him to conjecture and suggest that these were fragments of a whole, which, at its first creation, had occupied the vacant position, with a magnitude not disproportionate to that assigned to the other planets. Since then there have been, and continue to be, discoveries of more and more such fragmental planets, all moving at solar distances so close upon that numbered 28, as to pass each other almost, as has been said, within peril; but in orbits which seem capriciously elevated and depressed, when referred to the planes