een revived and
elaborated by Dr. Seeliger of Munich,[1482] is ingenious, but was not
designed to apply to our present case. Neither of the objects
distinguished by the striking variations just described is of gaseous
constitution. That in Scorpio appears under high magnifying powers as a
"compressed cluster"; that in Andromeda is perhaps, as Sir J. Herschel
suggested, "optically nebulous through the smallness of its constituent
stars"[1483]--if stars they deserve to be called.

On the 8th of December, 1891, Dr. Max Wolf took a photograph of the
region about Chi Aurigae. No stranger so bright as the eighth
magnitude was among the stars depicted upon it. On the 10th,
nevertheless, a stellar object of the fifth magnitude, situated a couple
of degrees to the north-east of Beta Tauri and previously
unrecorded, where eleventh magnitude stars appeared, imprinted itself
upon a Harvard negative. Subsequent photographs taken at the same place
showed it to have gained about half a magnitude by the 20th; but the
plates were not then examined, and the discovery was left to be modestly
appropriated by an amateur, the Rev. Dr. Anderson of Edinburgh, by whom
it was announced, February 1, 1892, through the medium of an anonymous
postcard, to Dr. Copeland, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland.[1484] By
him and others, the engines of modern research were promptly set to
work. And to good purpose. Nova Aurigae was the first star of its kind
studied by the universal chemical method. It is the first, accordingly,
of which authentic records can be handed down to posterity. They are of
a most remarkable character. The spectrum of the new object was
photographed at Stonyhurst and South Kensington on February 3; a few
days later, at Harvard and Lick in America, at Potsdam and Hereny on the
Continent of Europe. But by far the most complete impression was
secured, February 22, with an exposure of an hour and three-quarters, by
Sir William and Lady Huggins, through whose kindness it is reproduced in
Plate V., Fig. 1. The range of bright lines displayed in it is of
astonishing vividness and extent. It includes all the hydrogen rays dark
in the spectrum of Sirius (separately printed for comparison), besides
many others still more refrangible, as yet unidentified. Very
significant, too, is the marked character of the great prominence lines
H and K. The visual spectrum of the Nova was splendidly effective.
A quartette of brilliant green rays, two of them