“GAUGING THE HEAVENS.”
Sir William Herschel, in 1785, conceived the happy idea of counting the number of stars which passed at different heights and in various directions over the field of view, of fifteen minutes in diameter, of his twenty-feet reflecting telescope. The field of view each time embraced only 1/833000th of the whole heavens; and it would therefore require, according to Struve, eighty-three years to gauge the whole sphere by a similar process.