nebulae. The most curious of these was the linking together of
stars by nebulous chains. In one case seven aligned stars appeared
strung on a silvery filament, "like beads on a rosary."[1564] The "rows
of stars," so often noticed in the sky, may, then, be concluded to have
more than an imaginary existence. Of the 2,326 stars recorded in these
pictures, a couple of hundred among the brightest can, at the outside,
be reckoned as genuine Pleiades. The great majority were relegated, by
Pickering's[1565] and Stratonoff's[1566] counts of the stellar populace
_in_ and _near_ the cluster, to the position of outsiders from it. They
are undistinguished denizens of the abysmal background upon which it is
projected.

Investigations of its condition were carried a stage further by Barnard.
On November 14, 1890,[1567] he discovered visually with the Lick
refractor a close nebulous satellite to Merope, photographs of which
were obtained by Keeler in 1898.[1568] It appears in them of a rudely
pentagonal shape, a prominent angle being directed towards the adjacent
star. Finally, an exposure of ten hours made by Barnard with the Willard
lens indicated the singular fact that the entire group is embedded in a
nebulous matrix, streaky outliers of which blur a wide surface of the
celestial vault.[1569] The artist's conviction of the reality of what
his picture showed was confirmed by negatives obtained by Bailey at
Arequipa in 1897, and by H. C. Wilson at Northfield (Minnesota) in
1898.[1570]

With the Ealing 3-foot reflector, sold by Dr. Common to Mr. Crossley,
and by him presented to the Lick Observatory, Professor Keeler took in
1899 a series of beautiful and instructive nebula[1571] photographs; One
of the Trifid may be singled out as of particular excellence. An
astonishing multitude of new nebulae were revealed by trial-exposures
with this instrument. A "conservative estimate" gave 120,000 as the
number coming within its scope. Moreover, the majority of those actually
recorded were of an unmistakable spiral character, and they included
most of Sir John Herschel's "double nebulae," previously supposed to
exemplify the primitive history of binary stellar systems.[1572] Dr. Max
Wolf's explorations with a 6-inch Voigtlaender lens in 1901 emphatically
reaffirmed the inexhaustible wealth of the nebular heavens. In one
restricted region, midway between Praesepe and the Milky Way, he located
135 nebulae, where only three had until then been