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No mere sleep was allowed her; an astronomical passion seemed to have possessed the young lady, and she dashed into the tides, and the causes of the harvest-moon, and volcanoes, and thunderbolts, and Lord Rosse's telescope, forcing her tired friend to reply by direct appeals, till Albinia almost wished her in the moon herself; and was rejoiced when in the dim greyness of the early summer dawn, the carriage drew up at Madame Belmarche's house.

But there is a picture, the pendant of the Memnon, there is a dreadful cartoon, from the gallery which has begun to open upon Lord Rosse's telescope, where the appropriate atmosphere for investing it must be drawn from another silence, from the frost and from the eternities of death.

Almost the first point which would strike the visitor to Lord Rosse's telescope is that the instrument at which he is looking is not only enormously greater than anything of the kind that he has ever seen before, but also that it is something of a totally different nature.

Thus was completed the most colossal instrument for the exploration of the heavens which the art of man has ever constructed. It was once my privilege to be one of those to whom the illustrious builder of the great telescope entrusted its use. For two seasons in 1865 and 1866 I had the honour of being Lord Rosse's astronomer.

This form, previously known in Lord Rosse's great ``Whirlpool Nebula, had been supposed to be exceptional; now the photographs, far excelling telescopic views in the revelation of nebular forms, showed the spiral to be the typical shape. Indeed, it is a question whether all nebulæ are not to some extent spiral.

Proctor gave a preliminarily interpretation of their complexities on this principle, and Easton of Rotterdam has renewed the attempt with better success. A most suggestive delineation of the Milky Way, completed in 1889, after five years of labour, by Dr. Otto Boedicker, Lord Rosse's astronomer at Parsonstown, was published by lithography in 1892.

The variables S and R are both red. The former ranges between magnitudes eight and twelve, period two hundred and eighty days, and the latter between magnitudes six and eleven, period about three hundred and ninety days. The nebula 4628 is Rosse's "Saturn nebula," so called because with his great telescope it presented the appearance of a nebulous model of the planet Saturn.

The very first application of Lord Rosse's telescopes to the heavens overturned the hypothesis; and with such unequivocal facts as that instrument has brought to light, we regard it as a most unwarrantable assumption to suppose that there are in the heavenly spaces any masses of matter different from solid bodies, composing planetary systems."

Indeed one who was well acquainted with him believed Lord Rosse's special interest in the great telescope ceased when the last nail had been driven into it. But the telescope was never allowed to lie idle, for Lord Rosse always had associated with him some ardent young astronomer, whose delight it was to employ to the uttermost the advantages of his position in exploring the wonders of the sky.