igious object. More than six times the nebulous area depicted on Dr.
Common's plates is covered by it, and it plainly shows an adjacent
nebula, separately catalogued by Messier, to belong to the same vast
formation.

This disposition to annex and appropriate has come out more strongly
with every increase of photographic power. Plates exposed at Harvard
College in March, 1888, with an 8-inch portrait-lens (the same used in
the preparation of the Draper Catalogue) showed the old-established
"Fish-mouth" nebula not only to involve the stars of the sword-handle,
but to be in tolerably evident connection with the most easterly of the
three belt-stars, from which a remarkable nebulous appendage was found
to proceed.[1545] A still more curious discovery was made by W. H.
Pickering in 1889.[1546] Photographs taken in three hours from the
summit of Wilson's Peak in California revealed the existence of an
enormous, though faint spiral structure, enclosing in its span of nearly
seventeen degrees the entire stellar and nebulous group of the Belt and
Sword, from which it most likely, although not quite traceably, issues
as if from a nucleus. A startling glimpse is thus afforded of the
cosmical importance of that strange "hiatus" in the heavens which
excited the wonder of Huygens in 1656. The inconceivable attenuation of
the gaseous stuff composing it was virtually demonstrated by Mr.
Ranyard.[1547]

In March, 1885, Sir Howard Grubb mounted for Dr. Isaac Roberts, at
Maghull, near Liverpool (his observatory has since been transferred to
Crowborough in Sussex), a silver-on-glass reflector of twenty inches
aperture, constructed expressly for use in celestial photography. A
series of nebula-pictures, obtained with this fine instrument, have
proved highly instructive both as to the structure and extent of these
wonderful objects; above all, one of the great Andromeda nebula, to
which an exposure of three hours was given on October 1, 1888.[1548] In
it a convoluted structure replaced and rendered intelligible the
anomalously rifted mass seen by Bond in 1847.[1549] The effects of
annular condensation appeared to have stamped themselves upon the plate,
and two attendant nebulae presented the aspect of satellites already
separated from the parent body, and presumably revolving round it. The
ring-nebula in Lyra was photographed at Paris in 1886, and shortly
afterwards by Von Gothard with a 10-inch reflector,[1550] and he
similarly depicted i