The law administered in the court of the staple, so far as regarded all matters connected with the staple, was the law merchant [Lax NERCAT0111A1, and not the common law of the land, nor the custom of the place. If both parties in a suit were foreigners, all the jury were to be foreigners. If one party was native, the other foreign, the jury was to be half native, half foreign. Upon the judgment of the court execution was to be done in the manner provided for by the statute merchant. The statute contains various other enactments relating to the internal regulations of the staple.
Several other statutes were passed in the same and succeeding reigns, in some respects confirming, in others altering the provisions of the leading statute. As commerce became more extended, the staples appear to have fallen into disuse. Lord Coke, a great worshipper of antiquity, complains that in his time the staple had become a shadow ; we have only now, he says, stapulam umbmtilem, whereas it was formerly said that wealth followed the staple. The practice, however, of taking recognisances by statute staple, from the many advantages attending them, long continued. (11 Edw. I.; 27 Edw. III. caps. 1, 3, to 6, 8, 9; 2 Inst. 322; Cont. Dig. tit. 'Stat. Staple ; 2 Saund. by Wms. 69 ; Reeves, (fist. Eng. Law, v. 2, pp. 161, 393.) STA lt, DOUBLE STAR. We distinguish the stars from the planets In much the same way as our ancestors did before us, though there is hardly one point of difference which is now left to its full extent. A contemporary of the publication of the Principia' (1687), engaged in writing an article like the present, would have stated that the only notion out of which antiquity described a star was derived from its fixedness in the heavens; to which he would have added that these stars present uo appearance of systematic arrangement, that their dis tance is too great to be measured, and that they exert no sensible attraction on the solar system. Not one point of this is now left except the last : the speculation described in MILKY War gives a high pro bability to the theory that the universe is a collection of vast systems of stars ; observations of double stars have rendered it certain that many organised systems, regulated by mutual attraction, exist in space, besides our solar system ; it is fully established that numbers of stars, once called fixed, have slow motion of their own in the heavens; and in a few instances at least there is no room left for doubt that [PARALLAX or THE FIXED STARS] the distance of the stars has been approximately ascertained. That no discoverable effect of attractiou upon our system can be traced, is the only point in which the stellar astronomy of our own day coincides, to the full extent with that of the time of Newton.
The apparent motions of the stars are first to be cleared of the effects of PRECESSION AND MUTATION, and also of ABERRATION, which depend on motions of our earth, as well as of the grand diurnal revolution. From the REFRACTION of our atmosphere, and from the various casualties to which the rays of light are subject in passing through it, proceed, besides the increase of apparent altitude alluded to in the article cited, a great many varieties of colour and general appearance, particularly that decided size which most of the stars appear to have. A good telescope reduces this phenomenon very much, in favourable states of the atmosphere ; but even these instruments are not so per feet as to show the stars to be what there is no doubt they ought to be, mere luminous points. If the apparent diameter of (11 Cygni, the earth's atmosphere being entirely removed, were only one-third of a second, or one-thirtieth of that of Venus when smallest, it is now known that the diameter of that star must be equal to that of the earth's orbit.
Independently of relative position, the stars are distinguished by their colour and quantity of light, on which last in a great degree depends their apparent magnitude. A casual observer would hardly think that there was any difference of colour between one and another ; but a little practice shows that a tinge of one or another colour pre dominates a little in the nearly white light which all the stars have in common; and a good telescope gives some stars an appearance which observers have not scrupled to call " blood-red." And when the two stars of a close double star are together in the field of a telescope, it most frequently happens that each star differs sensibly in colour front the other. But when we look at a star, we must remember that we see only the result of the treatment which its light has received from the atmosphere; and with a telescope the matter is in some respects worse, for there is no object glass which forms anything like a real image. "When we look at a bright star," says Sir John Herschel, "through a very good telescope with a low magnifying power, its appearance is that of a condensed brilliant mass of light, of which it is impossible to discern the shape for the brightness ; and which, let the goodness of the telescope be what it will, is seldom free from some small ragged appendages or rays. But when we apply a magnifying power from 200 to 300, the star is then seen (in favourable eircum. stances of tranquil atmosphere, uniform temperature, &c.) as a per.