As Professor Nichol very truly remarks, 'investigation regarding such
aggregations is virtually a branch of atomic and molecular inquiry,'
with stars in place of atoms, mighty spheres in place of 'dust,' 'the
firmament above' instead of 'the firmament beneath.' In fact, the
astronomer, in sweeping with his telescopic eye the 'blue depths of
ether,' is, as it were, some Lilliputian inhabitant of an atom prying
into the autumnal structure of some Brobdignagian world of saw-dust;
organised into spiral and other elementary forms, of life, it may be,
something like our own. The infinite height appears, in short, like
the infinite depth, and we knowing not precisely where we stand
between the two immensities of depth and height! The shapes evolved by
the wonderful telescope of Lord Rosse are, many of them, absolutely
fantastical; wonder and awe are mingled with almost ridiculous
feelings in contemplating the strange apparitions--strange
monstrosities we had almost called them--that are pictured on the
background of the illustrations. One aggregation looms forth out of
the darkness like the skeleton face of some tremendous mammoth, or
other monstrous denizen of ancient times, with two small fiery eyes,
however, gazing out of its great hollow orbits; another consists of a
central nucleus, with arms of stars radiating forth in all directions,
like a star-fish, or like the scattering fire-sparks of some
pyrotechnic wheel revolving; a third resembles a great wisp of straw,
or twist or coil of ropes; a fourth, a cork-screw, or other spiral,
seen on end; a fifth, a crab; a sixth, a dumb-bell--many of them
scroll or scrolls of some thin texture seen edgewise; and so on. It is
even a suggestion of the author's, that some of the spiral and armed
wheels may be revolving yet in the vast ocean of space in which they
are engulfed. Thus has the telescope traced the 'binding' influences
of the Pleiades, loosened the bands of 'Orion'--erst the chief
_nebulous_ hazy wonders, once and for all revealing its separate
stars: and thus, in brief, has this wondrous instrument 'unrolled the
heavens as a scroll.' Yet even these astonishing results are as
nothing to the fact, that those fantastic shapes which it has revealed
in the depths of this _lambo_ of creation, are not shapes merely of
the present time--that thousands of years have passed since the light
that shewed them left the starry firmaments only now revealed--that
the telescope, in short, in reflecting these astonishing shapes,
deliver to the eye of mind turned inward on the long-stored records of
a universal and eternal memory of the past, than to a mere eye of
sense looking outward on the things of passing time!--_The Builder_.