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"In due course of time the entire of the remaining nebulous mass would become affected with rotation from the more rapidly moving centre, and would assume what appears to me to be their inherent normal condition, namely, spirality, as the prevailing character of their structure; and as that is actually the aspect which may be said to characterise the majority of those marvellous nebulae, as revealed to us by Lord Rosse's magnificent telescope, I am strongly impressed with the conviction that such reasons as I have assigned have been the cause of their spiral aspect and arrangement.

He would have been unable to conceive such an instrument as Lord Rosse's; the design, therefore, at present evidenced by the telescope was not design all on the part of one and the same person. Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail has been doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith seized and made the best of.

As there did not seem to be either air or water on its surface, the inhabitants would have a rather hard time of it, and if they went to meeting the sermons would be apt to be rather dry. If there were a building on it as big as York minster, as big as the Boston Coliseum, the great telescopes like Lord Rosse's would make it out.

Had Milton's 'incestuous mother, with her fleshless son, and with the warrior angel, his father, that led the rebellions of heaven, been suddenly unmasked by Lord Rosse's instrument, in these dreadful distances before which, simply as expressions of resistance, the mind of man shudders and recoils, there would have been nothing more appalling in the exposure; in fact, it would have been essentially the same exposure: the same expression of power in the detestable phantom, the same rebellion in the attitude, the same pomp of malice in the features to a universe seasoned for its assaults.

It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are nothing but raindrops. But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop grows, why then It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.

I don't want to be boiled like a lobster!" "Wait a moment," cautioned Mr. Roumann, with a smile. "Later, Lord Rosse's own investigations, and those of Langley, threw some doubts on this.

But the reader naturally asks, How does all this concern Lord Rosse's telescope on the one side, or general astronomy on the other? This nebula, he will say, seems a bad kind of fellow by your account; and of course it will not break my heart to hear, that he has had the conceit taken out of him.

Sir John Herschel's views as to the nature of nebulæ were considerably modified by Lord Rosse's success in "resolving" with his great reflectors a crowd of these objects into stars.

Meanwhile there seemed good ground for the persuasion, which now, for the last time, gained the upper hand, that nebulæ are, without exception, true "island-universes," or assemblages of distant suns. Lord Rosse's telescope possesses a nominal power of 6,000 that is, it shows the moon as if viewed with the naked eye at a distance of forty miles.

Lord Rosse's telescope has revealed in it a complicated spiral structure, recalling the photographs of the Andromeda nebula, and indicating that stupendous changes must be in process within it, although our records of observation are necessarily too brief to bring out any perceptible alteration of figure.