Such popular emotions caused by the appearance of Venus are not confined to our own times. In December 1797 the young General Bonaparte, after his wonderful conquest of Italy, returned to Paris to receive from the Directory the honours which presaged the consulate. Attended by a brilliant staff, he was going on horseback to the palace of the Luxembourg, where the Directory awaited him, when he was surprised to see, in the Rue de Tournon, all the people who stood ready to greet him turn round and look at a point in the sky instead of looking at him. His aide-de-camp told him that a star shone in the sky and that the French saw in it the star of the conqueror of Italy. It was Venus, then at its maximum brightness. Political conditions have changed, but the star remains. It was there in mythological times: Venus Astarte, daughter of the sea, Shook off her mother’s tears amid her fond caresses And fertilised the earth in wringing out her tresses. She was there, receiving the lovers’ holocausts within the temples consecrated to her in Greece, Egypt, India, all over the world, for it was from her brilliant or mysterious aspects of the morning and evening that the cult of her charming personality was derived. Even nowadays many an observer sees in her only a radiant beauty in an ethereal dwelling-place, and does not remember that science has explained the idol and transfigured the star. From its greatest easterly elongation to its greatest westerly elongation the brightness of the planet is such that when it is not quite close to the sun it is usually seen with the naked eye in daylight. Its phases are always curious and interesting. Their discovery by Galileo was of great importance to the beginning of modern astronomy in proving that the planets are globes without light of their own, similar to the globe which we inhabit. * * * * * Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space; Venus has become a celestial Earth, our sister and neighbour, and the better-informed eyes which contemplate it to-day see in her, not, like Homer and Manilius, a luminous point shining above our heads and controlling the feelings of our hearts and the movement of our blood, but a world corresponding to the world we ourselves inhabit, gravitating like us round the same sun, living on the same light and heat, and fit like ours to bear a thinking race for whom the Earth we inhabit is itself a star in the sky.