anyone who has the command of a shilling or two, and, what is perhaps still more important, of a little patience. The writer has still in his possession an object-glass made out of a simple single eyeglass, such as is worn by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. This, mounted in a cardboard tube with another single lens in a sliding tube as an eye-piece, proved competent to reveal the more prominent lunar craters, a number of sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the existence, though not the true form, of Saturn's ring. Its total cost, if memory serve, was one shilling and a penny. Of course it showed, in addition, a number of things which should not have been seen, such as a lovely border of colour round every bright object; but, at the same time, it gave a great deal more than thirteen pence worth of pleasure and instruction. Furthermore, there is this to be said in favour of beginning with a cheap and inferior instrument, that experience may thus be gained in the least costly fashion. The budding astronomer is by nature insatiably curious. He wants to know the why and how of all the things that his telescope does or does not do. Now this curiosity, while eminently laudable in itself, is apt in the end to be rather hard upon his instrument. A fine telescope, whatever its size may be, is an instrument that requires and should receive careful handling; it is easily damaged, and costly to replace. And therefore it may be better that the beginner should make his earlier experiments, and find out the more conspicuous and immediately fatal of the many ways of damaging a telescope, upon an instrument whose injury, or even whose total destruction, need not cause him many pangs or much financial loss.