ed into those stars; and yet, if such a process does
not occur, what is the meaning of that narrow nebulous streak in the
Pleiades along which five or six stars are strung like beads on a
string? The surroundings of this cluster, 1360, as one sweeps over them
with the telescope gradually drawing toward the nucleus, have often
reminded me of the approaches to such a city as London. Thicker and
closer the twinkling points become, until at last, as the observers eye
follows the gorgeous lines of stars trending inward, he seems to be
entering the streets of a brilliantly lighted metropolis.

Other objects in Gemini that we can ill miss are: , double, magnitudes
three and eleven, distance 73", p. 76 deg., colors yellow and blue; 15,
double, magnitudes six and eight, distance 33", p. 205 deg.; gamma,
remarkable for array of small stars near it; 38, double, magnitudes six
and eight, distance 6.5", p. 162 deg., colors yellow and blue (very pretty);
lambda, double, magnitudes four and eleven, distance 10", p. 30 deg., color
of larger star blue--try with the five-inch; epsilon, double, magnitudes
three and nine, distance 110", p. 94 deg..

From Gemini we pass to Cancer. This constellation has no large stars,
but its great cluster Praesepe (1681 on map No. 4) is easily seen as a
starry cloud with the naked eye. With the telescope it presents the most
brilliant appearance with a very low power. It was one of the first
objects that Galileo turned to when he had completed his telescope, and
he wonderingly counted its stars, of which he enumerated thirty-six, and
made a diagram showing their positions.

The most interesting star in Cancer is zeta, a celebrated triple. The
magnitudes of its components are six, seven, and seven and a half;
distances 1.14", p. 6 deg., and 5.7", p. 114 deg.. We must use our five-inch
glass in order satisfactorily to separate the two nearest stars. The
gravitational relationship of the three stars is very peculiar. The
nearest pair revolve around their common center in about fifty-eight
years, while the third star revolves with the other two, around a center
common to all three, in a period of six or seven hundred years. But the
movements of the third star are erratic, and inexplicable except upon
the hypothesis advanced by Seeliger, that there is an invisible, or
dark, star near it by whose attraction its motion is perturbed.

In endeavoring to picture the condition of things in zeta Cancri we
might im