Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/352

 and all make up a picture suggestive rather of the Inferno or the wars of thunderbolt and tempest than an exemplification of the most important of the arts of peace.

[To be continued.]

 

T is wonderful what a mass of evidence confirmatory of the nebular hypothesis in its broadest sense has been accumulated within the past few years. Most of this new testimony in favor of an old theory has been furnished by Astronomical Photography, that giant that sees the invisible, which has recently risen to the aid of astronomers with the startling suddenness and unexpectedness of the Arab fisherman's afrite escaping from the despised bottle. Perhaps the most notable of these celestial photographs, in the direct light that it throws upon the nebular hypothesis, is Mr. Roberts's already famous picture of the Andromeda nebula. Nobody can look upon the vast nebulous spirals that this photograph reveals, surrounding a great central condensation, and showing here and there a brighter knot where a satellite of the huge focal mass is in process of formation, without feeling that Laplace and Kant were not very far astray in their guess as to the mode of formation of the solar system.

But, although stars in abundance are scattered over and around the Andromeda nebula, there is little in their appearance to suggest a connection between them and the nebula. It is different with the nebulæ in the Pleiades and in Orion. In the wonderful photographs of the Pleiades by the Henry brothers of Paris one not only sees masses of nebulous matter clinging, so to speak, to some of the more conspicuous stars, but in one place a long, straight, narrow strip of nebula has stars dotted along its whole length, like diamonds strung upon a ribbon. It becomes more difficult to resist the conclusion that in this strange nebulous streak, with its starry file, we possess an indication of the mode 