must be situated in or near the constellation Taurus. A careful examination of all the stars in that quarter of the heavens made him finally fix upon Alcyone, the central orb of the Pleiades, as being the object of his search. It is probable that his speculations are somewhat premature; the data upon which they are founded are slight and partially uncertain, on account of the extreme slowness of the motions from which they are deduced. In fact it is probable that many generations must pass away before a sufficiently long course of observation can either fully confirm or disprove the conclusions at which he arrived. If his theory be correct, the sweet influences of the Pleiades must be potent influences indeed. Holding their eternal court unmoved in the centre of the heavens, they send out their resistless influence to the farthest confines of space, and bend into stately curves around them the most distant bodies of the universe, some of whose grand orbits cannot be traversed in less than five hundred million years.

THE NEBULE..

THE astronomer has now completed his investigation of the great stellar system of which our sun forms a member. The figure of that system has been defined, its dimensions calculated, and its motions traced out and analyzed. This was the consummation to which, until very recent periods, astronomers of all ages had been accustomed to look as the great goal to which their science tended, though a goal which even the most sanguine of them scarcely hoped that it would ever actually reach. And now that it has been so fully attained, can the astronomer sit down and rest on his laurels and boast that he has fathomed the remotest depths of the universe of God? Not so. While with slow and toilsome steps he has been creeping up to his first goal, he has at the same time been seeing another gradually emerging from the obscurity in front of him, and now that the former is reached, it is but to see the latter standing clearly out in the

distance, more hopelessly inaccessible than the other had ever seemed to be. For when we stand on the remotest orb of the Milky Way the telescope reveals new marvels to our gaze, and opens up fresh and undreamt of regions for scientific research. Not yet are the wonders of creation exhausted. Had it been so, had these really been the uttermost bounds of God's created works, we should still have pronounced them well worthy in magnificence and grandeur of the Omnipotence which called them into being. Let us think for a moment on what a scale of inconceivable magnitude the universe thus far is built. The orbit of our earth is two hundred million miles in diameter, but so insignificant is, this vast distance compared with the great gulf which separates. us from the fixed stars, that to all except: the very most powerful telescopes those stars seem to occupy exactly the same positions in the sky when viewed from two opposite points of our course.

Try a still farther flight,-pass over twenty millions of millions of miles. We have reached the nearest of the stars, and taking our stand on one of its planets, and waiting till evening falls, we look eagerly abroad to mark the altered aspect of the heavens. Here surely, where we have put such an overwhelming distance between us and our former position, the

face of the sky will be no longer recognizable-the old heavens will have passed away from over our head, as well as the old earth from beneath our feet. But no,-as the stars one by one steal out from the darkness, they group themselves into their old well-known configurations. There is the Little Bear with its pole-star, and the Great Bear with its pointers, there are the bands of Orion and the sweet influences of the Pleiades, there are Mazzaroth and Arcturus, just as they appeared to Job five thousand years ago, and sixty billion miles away. Vast as is the space we have traversed, it is not a thousandth part of that which separates the two most distant stars of the system, and hence we need not wonder that the change we have found is no greater than that which comes over the distant landscape as the traveller advances a score or two of yards along his way. Let us then pursue our journey still further. Sun after sun beams upon us with its brilliant band of planets and comets,—sun after sun pales and lessens in the distance as we leave it behind in our flight. And gradually a change creeps over the face of the heavens. The general figures of the constellations remain the same, but those behind contract their dimensions and shrink more closely together, while those in front are opening out and growing

larger and brighter. At length we near the farthest confines of the Milky Way. Very few and very scattered are the stars which still remain in front of us. We can number them all with ease. And now but three are left before us,-but two,-but one. That one is reached in turn. We pass to the further side and look forth into the mysterious abyss which lies beyond. Before, behind, to the right, to the left, whichever way we turn our gaze, it meets with nought but the blackness of darkness,— the deep gloom of the midnight sky is unbroken by the gleam of a single star. Onward still we wing our daring flight; the last resting-place is abandoned, the last oasis left behind, and we adventure forth into the trackless wastes of space. One by one the planets of this last sun are passed in our course; now and then a comet overtakes us, and blazes swiftly past into the depths beyond; but if we look onwards, we see that even it soon pauses in its reckless flight, and wheels back on rapid wing to less solitary and untrodden regions. The sun itself dwindles down to a star, and takes its place among a cluster of others which come forth from behind and around it as its paling light permits them to become visible. And soon this cluster too fades, till all distinction of stars in it is lost, and nothing.