of their construction." He admits, however, that, in course of time, "many things must have been suggested by the great variety in the order, the size, and the compression of the stars as they presented themselves to his view." As the number of stars he counted increased, the brightness of the Milky Way increased; as the number diminished, its apparent brightness to the naked eye diminished also. The law of gravitation he felt certain existed among that vast multitude of suns and systems, just as it exists in pulling a stone to the ground. At first this was mere suspicion. More than twenty years elapsed before he could say it was an established fact.
He continued his review of the heavens, or his gauging of the stars. The results were so marvellous that all the world—men of science, the common people, even children at school—wondered. Sometimes he saw, in a small celestial space, as many as 250, or 340, or 424, or 588 stars; at other times he counted only 3 or 4, 5 or 6. The star-wealth of some of these regions was so vast that in one only 5° in breadth—a very small part of the whole vault of the heavens—there were about 330,000 shining suns or stars! The Chancellor of the University of Halle, who visited Herschel shortly before his death, evidently got from the astronomer himself that he had "often known more than 50,000 pass before his sight within an hour," and he records his own wonder, and the wonder of men generally, while these discoveries were still fresh in their minds, that "after the invention of his instruments, I. H. Schroeter, the celebrated astronomer of Lilienthal, might well compute the fixed stars in the southern
