celestial body ever gets except the moon--and, it might be added,
except meteors and, by chance, a comet, or a comet's tail. Its least
possible distance from the earth is less than 14,000,000 miles, and it
was nearly as close as that, without anybody knowing or suspecting the
fact, in 1894, four years in advance of its discovery. Yet the fact,
strange as the statement may seem, had been recorded without being
recognized. After De Witt's discovery of Eros in 1898, at a time when it
was by no means as near the earth as it had been some years before,
Prof. E.C. Pickering ascertained that it had several times imprinted its
image on the photographic plates of the Harvard Observatory, with which
pictures of the sky are systematically taken, but had remained
unnoticed, or had been taken for an ordinary star among the thousands of
star images surrounding it. From these telltale plates it was
ascertained that in 1894 it had been in perihelion very near the earth,
and had shone with the brilliance of a seventh-magnitude star.

It will, unfortunately, be a long time before Eros comes quite as near
us as it did on that occasion, when we failed to see it, for its close
approaches to the earth are not frequent. Prof. Solon I. Bailey selects
the oppositions of Eros in 1931 and 1938 as probably the most favorable
that will occur during the first half of the twentieth century.

We turn to the extraordinary fluctuations in the light of Eros, and the
equally extraordinary conclusions drawn from them. While the little
asteroid, whose diameter is estimated to be in the neighborhood of
twenty or twenty-five miles, was being assiduously watched and
photographed during its opposition in the winter of 1900-1901, several
observers discovered that its light was variable to the extent of more
than a whole magnitude; some said as much as two magnitudes. When it is
remembered that an increase of one stellar magnitude means an accession