Among the countless stars of heaven a great catastrophe seems occasionally to occur. A star bursts out into sudden flame, to all appearance, or a great fixed star appears where no star had ever been seen before. In Professor Proctor's article, "Suns in Flames" ("Myths and Marvels of Astronomy"), we will find an extended discussion of these wonderful phenomena. The astronomer Tycho Brahe described the one which appeared in 1572 as follows: "It suddenly shone forth in the constellation Cassiopeia with a splendor exceeding that of stars of the first magnitude, or even Jupiter or Venus at their brightest, and could be seen by the naked eye on the meridian at full day. Its brilliancy gradually diminished from the time of its first appearance, and at the end of sixteen months it entirely disappeared, and has never been seen since. During the whole time of its apparition its place in the heavens remained unaltered, and it had no annual parallax, so that its distance was of the same order as that of the fixed stars." Tycho described its changes of color as follows: first, as having been of a bright white; afterwards of a reddish-yellow, like Mars or Aldebaran; and, lastly, of a leaden white, like Saturn. In 1604 a first-magnitude star suddenly appeared in the right foot of Ophiucus. "It presented appearances resembling those shown by the former, and disappeared after a few months." Many other cases are cited by astronomers, and in 1866 "a star appeared in the Northern Crown, the observations of which threw great light on the subject of so-called new stars. In the first place, it was found that where this new star appeared there had been a tenth-magnitude star; the new star, then, was in reality a star long known, which had acquired new brilliancy. "When first observed with this abnormal lustre, it was shining as a star of the second magnitude. Examined with the spectroscope, its light revealed a startling state of things in those remote depths of space. The usual stellar spectrum, rainbow-tinted and crossed by dark lines, was seen to be crossed also by four exceedingly bright lines, the spectrum of glowing hydrogen.... The greater part of the star's light manifestly came from this glowing hydrogen, though it can scarcely be doubted that the rest of the spectrum was brighter than before the outburst, the materials of the star being raised to an intense heat. The maximum brightness exceeded that of a tenth-magnitude star nearly eight hundred times. After shining for a short time as a second-magnitude star, it diminished rapidly in lustre, and it is now between the ninth and tenth magnitudes" (Appleton's Cyclopædia). Of this new star, Professor Ball says, "Another memorable achievement in the early part of Dr. Huggins's career is connected with the celebrated new star that burst forth in the Crown in 1866. It seemed a fortunate coincidence that just at the moment when the spectroscope was beginning to be