"I will tell those disputants, my opponents, not my own opinion, but my wife's. Yesterday, when I was weary with writing, my mind being quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. 'It seems, then,' said I, aloud, 'that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar and oil, and slices of egg, had been flying about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad.' 'Yes,' says my wife, 'but not so nice and well-dressed as this of mine is.'" While there are no objects of special interest for the observer with an opera-glass in Ophiuchus, he will find it worth while to sweep over it for what he may pick up, and, in particular, he should look at the group of stars southeast of [beta] and [gamma]. These stars have been shaped into a little modern asterism called Taurus Poniatowskii, and it will be noticed that five of them mark the outlines of a letter V, resembling the well-known figure of the Hyades. Also look at the stars in the head of Serpens, several of which form a figure like a letter [X]. A little west of Theta ([theta]) in the tail of Serpens, is a beautiful swarm of little stars, upon which a field-glass may be used with advantage. The star [theta] is itself a charming double, just within the separating power of a very powerful field-glass under favorable circumstances, the component stars being only about one third of a minute apart. Do not fail to notice the remarkable subdivisions of the Milky-Way in this neighborhood. Its current seems divided into numerous channels and bays, interspersed with gaps that might be likened to islands, and the star [theta] appears to be situated upon one of these islands of the galaxy. This complicated structure of the Milky-Way extends downward to the horizon, and upward through the constellation Cygnus, and of its phenomenal appearance in that region we shall have more to say further on. Directly north of Ophiuchus is the constellation Hercules, interesting as occupying that part of the heavens toward which the proper motion of the sun is bearing the earth and its fellow-planets, at the rate, probably, of not less than 160,000,000 miles in a year--a stupendous voyage through space, of whose destination we are as ignorant as the crew of a ship sailing under sealed orders, and, like whom, we must depend upon such inferences as we can draw from courses and distances, for no other information comes to us from the flagship of our squadron. [Illustration: MAP 10.]