to number them: and He said unto him, So shall thy seed be."

The first catalogue of the stars of which we have record was that of
Hipparchus in 129 B.C. It contained 1,025 stars, and Ptolemy brought
this catalogue up to date in the Almagest of 137 A.D. Tycho Brahe in
1602 made a catalogue of 777 stars, and Kepler republished this in 1627,
and increased the number to 1,005. These were before the invention of
the telescope, and consequently contained only naked-eye stars. Since
astronomers have been able to sound the heavens more deeply, catalogues
have increased in size and number. Flamsteed, the first Astronomer
Royal, made one of 3,310 stars; from the observations of Bradley, the
third, a yet more famous catalogue has been compiled. In our own day
more than three hundred thousand stars have been catalogued in the Bonn
Durchmusterung; and the great International Photographic Chart of the
Heavens will probably show not less than fifty millions of stars, and in
this it has limited itself to stars exceeding the fourteenth magnitude
in brightness, thus leaving out of its pages many millions of stars that
are visible through our more powerful telescopes.

So when Abraham, Moses, Job or Jeremiah speaks of the host of heaven
that cannot be numbered, it does not mean simply that these men had but
small powers of numeration. To us,--who can count beyond that which we
can conceive,--as to the Psalmist, it is a sign of infinite power,
wisdom and knowledge that "He telleth the number of the stars; He
calleth them all by their names."

Isaiah describes the Lord as "He that sitteth upon the circle of the
earth, . . . that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth
them out as a tent to dwell in." And many others of the prophets use the
same simile of a curtain which we have seen to be so appropriate to the
appearance of the starry sky. Nowhere, however, have we any indication
whether or not they considered the stars were all set _on_ this curtain,
that is to say were all at the same distance from us. We now know that
they are not equidistant from us, but this we largely base on the fact
that the stars are of very different orders of brightness, and we judge
that, on an average, the fainter a star appears, the further is it
distant from us. To the Hebrews, as to us, it was evident that the stars
differ in magnitude, and the writer of the Epistle to the Corinthians
expressed this when he wrote--

"There is one glo