It is to Sir William Herschel that we owe the discovery, more than a hundred years ago, of the motion of the sun through the universe. From the consideration of a long series of observations of the positions of the stars this famous astronomer discovered that the stars in the direction of the constellation Hercules were separated by much greater angular distances than the stars diametrically opposite in the heavens. In other words, the stars were spreading apart in one portion of the heavens and crowding together in the opposite direction and he rightly interpreted this to mean that the sun was moving in the direction of the constellation of Hercules. It was not until the spectroscope was applied to the study of the heavens in the latter part of the nineteenth century that the amount of this motion of the sun was found to be about twelve and a half miles per second, or four times the distance from the earth to the sun in a year.