The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-03-05
ABOUT THE PLEIADES.
NOTABLE HISTORIC INTEREST OF
 THIS STAR-CL USIER.

-BesseI's and Elktn's Discoveries
 Strange NebuIar Structure-Astrono.
 micaI Predictions for March,
 Famed in legend; sung by early min
 strels of Persia and Hindustan;
 Hike a swarm of fire-hies,
 tangled in a silver braid';
 wonder distant misty little cloud of Pie
 iads has always won and held the imag- ination of men. But it was not only for
 the inspiration of poets, for quickening fancy into song, that the seven daugh-
 ters of Atlas were fixed upon the firma- ment. The problems presented by this
 group of stars to the unobtrusive sci entlf1c investigator are among the most interesting known to astronomy. Their
 solution is still very incomplete, but what we have already learned may be counted justly among the richest spells brought back by science from the stored treasure-house of Natures secrets.
 The true student of stronomy is anil mated by no mere vulgar curiosity to pry into things hidden. If he seeks the concealed springs that move the com pleX visible mechanism of the heavens, he does so because his imagination is reused by the grandeur of what he sees; and deep down within him stirs the true love of the artist for his art For it is, indeed fine art, that science of astron- omy.
 It can have been no mere chance that has massed the Pleiads from among their fellow stars. Men of ordinary cirr1,f hut 1,11f iron objects in the cluster; those of acuter vision can count fourteen; but it is not until we apply the space penetrating power of the telescope that we realize the extraordinary scale upon which the system of the Pleiades is constructed. With the Paris instrument Wolf cata- 1ogued 625 stars in the group; and the searching photographs survey of Henry in 1887 revealed no less than 2,326 dis tinct stars within and near the filmy gauge of nebulous matter always so conspicuous a feature of the Pleiades.
 The means at our disposal for the study of stellar distances are but fee ble. Only in the case of very small number of stars have we been able to obtain even so much as an approXi- mate estimate of distance. The most powerful observational machinery though directed by the tried skill of ex- perience, has not sufficed to sound the profounder depths of space, The Ple- iads stars axe among those for which no measurement of distance has yet been made, so that we do not know whether they are all equally far away from us. We see them projected on the dark back ground of the celestial vault; but we cannot tell from actual measurement whether they are all situated at the same point in space. It may be that some are immeasurably nearer to us than is the great mass of their compani- ons; possibly we look through the clus- ter at others far behind it, clinging as it were, to the very fringe of the visible universe.
 Farther on we shall find evidence that like this really is the case But under no circumstances is it req sonable to suppose that the whole body of stars can be strung out at all sorts of distances near a straight line point ing the direction of the visible cluster. Such distribution may perhaps re- main among the possibilities, so long as we cannot measure directly the actual distances of the individual stars. But science never accepts a mere possibility against which we can marshal strong circumstantial evidence. We may con- clude on general principles that the | gathering of these many objects into single close assemblage denotes com munity of origin and interests.
 The lPlieades then really belong to one | another. What is the nature of their ,,,1f, ,aJ AZ in0 hot ic t,,1rc ctrSy and can we solve it? The most obvious theory is, of course, suggested by what | we know to be true within our own | solar system We owe to Newton the | beautiful conception of gravitation, that | unique law by means of which astrono- mers have been enabled to reduce to | perfect order the seeming tangle of planetary evolutions. The law really | amounts, in effect, to this: All objects suspended within the vacancy of space attract or pull another How they can do this without a visible connecting link between them is a mystery which may remain unsolved. But mystery as it is we must accept it as an ascer- tained fact It is this pull of gravita- tion that holds together the sun and planets forcing them all to follow out their due and proper paths and so to continue throughout an unbroken cy- cle until the great survivor, Time, shall be no more.
 Why should not this same gravita- tional attraction be at work among the Pleiades? If it is, we must suppose that they, too, like ourselves, have bounds and orbits set and interwoven, revolu- tions and gyrations far more complex than the solar system knows. The visu- al discovery of such motion or rotation among the Pleiades may be called one of the pressing problems of asronomy to-day We fel sure that the time is ripe and that the discovery it actually being made at the present moment; for a generation of men is not too great q period to call a moment, when we have to deal with cosmic time. It is indeed the lack of observations { extending through sufficient centuries that stays our hand from grasping the s coveted result. The Pleiades are so far t rom us that we cannot be sure of l changes among them. Magnitudes are I ilways relative It matters not how Fl arge the actual movements may be; if C hey are actually small in comparison | with our distance, they must shrink $ .o nothingncss in OUT eyes Trembling |