precedent of 1846 might well have been repeated. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his friends would have been in no better condition to take office than Lord John Russell and the Whigs; and Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain would have found themselves back in power, in a stronger position than before. If, on the other hand, Mr. Balfour had definitely pronounced against Mr. Chamberlain, it would have been the natural thing for that energetic statesman to quit the Cabinet and to lay his views before the country, untrammelled by the responsibilities of office.

But what has actually happened seems to combine the maximum of humiliation and inconvenience. To avoid the responsibility of committing the Cabinet and perhaps of precipitating resignations, Mr. Balfour allowed the Corn Duty to be withdrawn, and then invented the quaint theory of Inquiry; or, in other words, authorised his colleagues to quarrel among themselves and to leave it to the public, in some indeterminate fashion, to decide the dispute. For the moment, no doubt, this device has met with a certain success, assisted, as it has been, by the extraordinary feebleness of the Opposition. The farce of the open mind has been maintained to the end of the Session; but it cannot last. The situation as it stands is clearly impossible. Those Ministers -and they are understood to be the majority-who are against Protection in any form, must feel themselves particularly aggrieved by the transparent official fiction. While they are supposed to be inquiring, Mr. Chamberlain is agitating. The Colonial Secretary may think, and not unreasonably, that time is on his side. Every week's delay will enable more people to get over their first fright, it will give scope for the propaganda of the Birmingham Tariff Committee, and it will allow certain unlucky sentences about taxing the food of the people to fade further into the background. It is hoped that the bulk of the party will gradually "come into line." Food taxation will not be dropped; but it will be whittled down into a mild two-shilling duty on corn, or something of that kind; and the strong item of the programme will be the threat against alien "dumpers" and cheap foreign competition. The adoption of this programme would really be a surrender for Mr. Chamberlain, since it will mean the abandonment of the most salient features of the scheme which he produced in outline in May. Nevertheless, if the Unionists, as a whole, can be induced to fight on that basis, the election will be Mr. Chamberlain's election, for he will assuredly be the most conspicuous figure in the fray; the victory, if it be achieved, will be Mr. Chamberlain's victory; and the party, if it comes. back to power, will have to follow Mr. Chamberlain's lead, and do his bidding. All this must be quite obvious to the Duke of

Devonshire, Mr. Ritchie, and the other Free Trade Unionist Ministers, and they are naturally disinclined to lend themselves to an arrangement so convenient to the colleague, who has, as they think, shown so little consideration for their own feelings. The psychological interest of the situation centres in the action of Mr. Balfour. As one has heard it put colloquially: "Will he check Chamberlain or chuck him?" Or will he come out openly in the Colonial Secretary's uniform and defy his own Free Traders? It may be that he will do none of these things, and again evince that curious misunderstanding of his responsibilities which has turned a Cabinet dispute into an overwhelming national controversy. There is a rumour that the Prime Minister may still make an effort to keep the Government and the party together by the appointment of a Royal Commission on Foreign and Colonial Trade, with the whole question "shelved" till the report is published. But it seems incredible that any such expedient can be seriously entertained. It is certainly foredoomed to failure if it is attempted. Now that the great fiscal issue has been raised, it must be fought out. Men cannot act together in administration, or in any other political business, when they are fundamentally divided on a question of this kind. There must be a secession from the Unionist Party, whether the official heads of that connection go with Mr. Chamberlain or against him, and it may at least as formidable as that which created the Unionist combination in 1886. And since this result is apparently inevitable, there seems nothing to be gained by the endeavour to postpone its formal acknowledgment. The sooner the new grouping can be arranged, the sooner will our politics readjust themselves to the revolutionary conditions created during the late Session. The spectacle of Free Traders and Protectionists firing into one another from rival platforms, while all alike are sailing under Government colours, will soon become offensive. Disraeli, in one of his bitter early speeches, called the Conservative Government an organised hypocrisy. The Cabinet, in its present state, seems to deserve the phrase with a difference. It has lost its sincerity, without retaining its organisation, and is rapidly demoralising its party as well as itself.

SIGMA.

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MAN'S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE:

A REPLY TO CRITICISMS.

My article on this subject in the March issue of this periodical having excited considerable interest, and several astronomers having done me the honour to criticise it, I gladly take the opportunity now offered me of making a brief reply to some of my critics, and also of defining my position somewhat more clearly.

I may at once admit that my former article, owing to the limited time then at my disposal, was written somewhat hastily; and that I made several suggestions and admissions which were of little importance to my general subject, but which laid me open to adverse criticism. Such were, a comparison of the stars of the Milky Way with the molecules of a gas, a comparison which I think I have seen made by some writer, but which was suggested to me by the repeated statements in all astronomical works that the proper motions of the stars are in all directions and at various velocities, which quite accords with those of gaseous molecules. I now see that there is probably no justification for this idea, and that the facts that suggested it are apparent only. A similar unfounded notion (I now think), was that of a variation of gravity near the boundary of the universe, which like the supposed loss of light in passing through the ether, had better be altogether left out of our calculations till some evidence has been adduced in support of them.

One other point to which several of my critics have referred, and as to which I think they have somewhat misrepresented me, no doubt quite unintentionally, is my supposed statement that our sun is placed at the exact centre of the universe. On looking over my article I find that I have in most places, when referring to this question, used qualifying words, such as at, or near the very central point," that we are "nearly equally distant from every part of" the Milky Way, "that our sun is one of the central orbs of a globular star cluster," which cluster occupies "a nearly central position," that it is " very near to, if not actually at, the centre of the whole visible universe," and then, for once, I omit the qualification and use the words "in all probability, in the centre of the whole material universe."

But this one slip some of my critics appear to have had chiefly

in mind. Professor Turner says, that my argument is that life is only possible at the exact centre," and that, though our sun is a mere unit of the solar cluster, I claim that it is "the central unit," whereas I say only "one of the central orbs." Professor Marcel Moye twice refers to me as saying that the sun is at "the very centre" of the Galaxy, and of the universe (Knowledge, June, p. 132). This, however, is a matter of detail hardly worth referring to. I will therefore pass at once to the more important criticisms, which are three in number: (1) that I have given no proof that the stars are not infinite; (2) that the sun's motion through space shows that our present central position can only be temporary; and (3) that there is no advantage whatever in a central position. Let us consider these points a little further.

(1) Is the evidence at our command for or against the infinite extension of the stellar universe? This is the real question, the only question we are able to discuss rationally. As to proof or disproof, either is impossible as regards what exists, or what does not exist in infinite space. And even as regards the probability of any particular form of existence being infinite, we have, and can have, no evidence, and without evidence it is irrational to hold any definite opinion. What I urged in my article was, that we do possess several distinct kinds of evidence, all pointing towards a limitation of our stellar universe; and I still think that this evidence is sufficient, because, this universe being on the enormous scale we know it to be, it is the only kind of evidence we can possibly get. I also find that most students of general astronomy express themselves quite clearly on this point. Sir John Herschel says that in some parts of the Milky Way there are spaces absolutely dark and completely void of any star, even of the smallest telescopic magnitude," and that in other parts, "extremely minute stars though never altogether wanting, occur in numbers so moderate as to lead us irresistibly to the conclusion that in these regions we see fairly through the starry stratum, since it is impossible otherwise (supposing their light not intercepted) that the numbers of the smaller magnitudes should not go on continually increasing ad infinitum. In such cases, moreover, the ground of the heavens, as seen between the stars, is for the most part perfectly dark, which again would not be the case if innumerable multitudes of stars, too minute to be individually discernible, existed beyond." And again, after stating that throughout by far the larger portion of the Milky Way the background of the sky is generally black, and that there is also an absence of excessive crowding of minute stars, he concludes that we have " unequivocal indications that its dimensions in directions where these conditions obtain, are not only not in

finite, but that the space-penetrating power of our telescopes suffices fairly to pierce through and beyond it."

These opinions of the man who had studied the whole sphere of the heavens most completely, and who had calmly and deliberately thought out most of the great problems of astronomy throughout a life devoted to the science, are certainly worthy of our attention and should outweigh the opinions or prejudices of those who ask for proofs of what cannot be proved.

Among modern astronomers, Dr. Isaac Roberts tells us that eleven years ago he took photographs of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, and has recently taken photographs of the same object with the same instrument (his 20-inch reflector), and with the same exposures, but with more sensitive plates than were obtainable at the earlier period. But although in the more recent plates both the nebulosity and the star-images are denser, they show no greater number of stars than the earlier ones. Exactly similar facts are recorded in the case of the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades.

Another modern astronomer, Mr. J. E. Gore, speaks very strongly on this question. He says:-"Those who do not give the subject sufficient consideration seem to think that the number of the stars is practically infinite, or at least, that the number is so great that it cannot be estimated. But this idea is totally incorrect, and due to complete ignorance of telescopic revelations. It is certainly true that to a certain extent the larger the telescope the more the number of the stars seems to increase; but we now know that there is a limit to this increase of telescopic vision. And the evidence clearly shows that we are rapidly approaching this limit. Although the number of stars visible in the Pleiades rapidly increases at first with increase in the size of the telescope used, and although photography has still further increased the number of stars in this remarkable cluster, it has recently been found that an increased length of exposure-beyond three hours— adds very few stars to the number visible on the photograph taken at the Paris Observatory in 1885, on which over 2,000 stars can be counted. Even with this great number on so small an area of the heavens, comparatively large vacant places are visible between the stars, and a glance at the original photograph is sufficient to show that there would be ample room for many times the number actually visible." And, referring to the fact that, near the north pole of the Galaxy, Celoria, with a quite small telescope, was able to see almost exactly the same number of stars as Sir William Herschel with his very powerful instruments, he remarks:-"Their absence, therefore, seems certain

(1) Outlines of Astronomy, last edition, pp. 578-9.