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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.