ng the same relative position of
the sister planet to recur only as often as she overtakes her in her
career. Thus the hour and minute hands of a watch, moving at different
rates of speed after meeting on the dial plate at twelve o'clock, will
not again come together until five minutes past one, when the swifter
paced of the two will have completed a revolution and a twelfth. But
were we to retard the motion of the latter, reducing it to only twice
that of its companion, they would always meet at the figure twelve, as
it would exactly complete two circuits while the hour hand was
performing one. Venus thus overtakes and passes the earth once in five
hundred and eighty-four days, or nearly two and a half of her own
years, constituting what is called her synodic period of apparent
revolution as seen from this globe. She thus presents to us all the
phases undergone by our own satellite during a lunar month, passing
from new to full, and _vice versa_, through the various intervening
gradations of form.

The phases of Venus are amongst the most beautiful subjects for
observation in a moderate telescope, as her silver bow, gradually
brightening in the evening dusk, or fading in the dawn,

"On a bed of daffodil sky,"

is, after the two greater luminaries that rule the day and night, the
most brilliant object in the heavens.

III.

THE SILVER CROWN.

The parallel between Venus and

"That orbed maiden with fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,"

is carried a stage further. Most of us are familiar with the spectacle
in which the Ancient Egyptians saw symbolized Horus on the lap of
Isis, but which we more prosaically term "the old moon in the new
moon's arms." The strongly illuminated half circle next the sun is
then seen embracing with its horns a dusky sphere, contrasting with it
as tarnished silver does with the newly burnished metal. The same
phenomenon is occasionally, though very rarely, exhibited by Venus,
while close to the sun at inferior injunction, when the shadowy form
of the full orb is seen to shine dimly within her crescent with what
is termed "the ashen light." More wonderful still, this "glimmering
sphere" is then crowned, as with a silver halo, by a thin luminous
arch, forming a secondary sickle facing the one nearest the sun, and
doubtless due to the refraction of his rays round the globe of the
planet, through the upper regions of her twilight atmosphere. This
spectacle was first ob