history of the Aryan race, and the rays of Regulus bring again the dreams of Babylon and Nineveh, of Greece and Rome, of India, and of the star-watching deserts of Arabia. Cyrus, in his conquering marches, may have looked to that star for help and inspiration, for it was the heavenly guardian of the Persian monarchs. The spectroscope tells us that Regulus, like Spica, is approaching us, but less rapidly, drawing nearer about 475,000 miles per day. But its distance is 950,000,000,000,000 miles (parallax 0″.02), and it outshines the sun one thousand times. The second star above Regulus, in the curve of the sickle’s blade, is Gamma (γ), or _Algieba_ (Arabic the “Forehead”), a beautiful double, probably binary, with a period of revolution which Doberck has estimated at about four hundred years. The larger star of the pair is golden-orange and the smaller bronze-green, a marvellous contrast, and an ordinary telescope shows well the spectacle, the distance between the components being 3″.78. And this wonderful pair is rushing toward the solar system at the rate of _two million miles per day_. Yet so great is its distance that we have no record that in a thousand years men have noticed a brightening of the headlight of this terrible locomotive of space! But probably the more refined methods of the present time, if applied for a similar period, would reveal an ominous expansion of that oncoming light. Gamma is interesting as marking, roughly, the spot in the sky which was the apparent centre of radiation for the November meteors, which were last seen in their splendor in 1866-67, their return in 1899-1900, for which the world had long been waiting, having been prevented by the disturbing attraction of Jupiter and Saturn, which shifted their orbit. The “Sickle” in its entirety is an attractive asterism, and hanging so conspicuously in the sky on a spring evening it may be imaginatively regarded as a harbinger of the opening of the season when the thoughts of men are turning to preparations for future harvests. In the height of the harvest season the “Sickle” sets near sundown, then no longer standing upright, but lying along upon the horizon--a symbol of the wearied husbandman’s approaching hours of rest: “Nor shall a starry night his hopes betray.” Away off at the eastern end of the constellation, in the lion’s tail, shines its second star in rank, Denebola (Arabic _Al Dhanab_, the “Tail”). It too is speeding hitherward, but only half as fast as Gamma. Like Aldebaran, the name Denebola has an indefinite charm, from its full round vowel sounds, and a certain nobility in the look of it as it lies on the printed page. As with many sonorous Indian names in American geography, these old star names lose something of their effect when they are translated. It is better to take them as they stand, transcending terrestrial analogy and definition, like the sublime objects that they designate.