his twenty-three associates began, in the last decade of
the eighteenth century, to search diligently for the verification of
Kepler's prediction and the fulfillment of Bode's Law. Oddly enough,
Piazzi was not one of the twenty-four astronomers who had agreed to
find the new world. He was exploring the heavens on his own account,
and in doing so, he found what the others had failed to find, that is,
the first asteroid.

The body discovered answered so little to the hopes of the
astronomical fraternity that they immediately said within themselves:
"This is not he; we seek another." So they continued the search, and
in a little more than a year Olbers himself was rewarded with the
discovery of the second of the planetoid group. On the twenty-eighth
of March, 1802, he made his discovery from an upper chamber of his
dwelling in Bremen, where he had his telescope. On the night in
question he was scanning the northern part of the constellation of
Virgo, when the sought-for object was found. This body, like the first
of its kind, was very small, and was found to be moving from west to
east in nearly the same orbit as its predecessor.

Here then was something wonderful. Olbers at once advanced the
hypothesis that probably the two bodies thus discovered were fragments
of what had been a large planet moving in its orbit through this part
of the heavens. If so there might be--and probably were--others of
like kind. The search was at once renewed, and on the night of the
first of September, 1804, the third of the asteroid group was found by
the astronomer Hardy, of Bremen. The belief that a large planet had
been disrupted in this region was strengthened, and astronomers
continued their exploration; but two years and a half elapsed before
another asteroid was found. On the evening of March 29, 1807, the
diligence of Olbers was rewarded with the discovery of the fourth of
the group, which like its predecessors, was so small and irregular in
character as still further to favor the fragmentary theory.

How shall we name the asteroids? Piazzi fell back upon pagan mythology
for the name of his little world, and called it Ceres, from the Roman
goddess of corn. Olbers named the second asteroid Pallas; the third
was called Juno--whose rank in the Greek and Roman pantheon might have
suggested one of the major planets as her representative in the skies;
and the fourth was called Vesta, from the Roman divinity of the
hearthstone.

Here th