[footnote] *The two Magellanic clouds, Nubecula major and Nubecula minor, are very remarkable objects. The larger of the two is an accumulated mass of stars, and consists of clusters of stars of irregular form, either conical masses or nebulae of different magnitudes and degrees of condensation. This is interspersed with nebulous spots, not resolvable into stars, but which are probably 'star dust', appearing only as a general radiance upon the telescopic field of a twenty-feet reflector, and forming a luminous ground on which other objects of striking and indescribable form are scattered. In no other portion of the heavens are so many nebulous and stellar masses thronged together in an equally small space. Nubecula minor is much less beautiful, has more unresolvable nebulous light, while the stellar masses are fewer and fainter in intensity. -- (From a letter of Sir John Herschel, Feldhuysen, Cape of Good Hope, 13th June, 1836.) The appearance of these clouds, of the brightly-beaming constellation Argo, of the Milky Way between Scorpio, the Centaur, and the Southern Cross, the picturesque beauty, if one may so speak, of the whole expanse of the southern celestial hemisphere, has left upon my mind an ineffaceable impression. The zodiacal light, which rises in a pyramidal form, and constantly contributes, by its mild radiance, to the external beauty of the tropical nights, is either a vast nebulous ring, rotating between the Earth and Mars, or, less probably, the exterior stratum of the solar atmosphere. Besides these luminous clouds and nebulae of definite form, exact and corresponding observations indicate the existence and the general distribution of an apparently non-luminous, infinitely-divided matter, which posssesses a force of resistance and manifests its presence in Encke's, and perhaps also in Biela's comet, by diminishing their eccentricity and shortening their period of revolution. Of this impending, ethereal, and cosmical matter, it may be supposed that it is in motion; that it gravitates, notwithstanding its original tenuity; that it is condensed in the vicinity of the great mass of the Sun; and, finally, that it may, for myriads of ages, have been augmented by the vapor emanating from the tails of comets. If we now pass from the consideration of the vaporous matter of the immeasurable regions of space [(Greek)*] -- whether scattered without definite form and limits, it exists as a cosmical other, or is condensed into nebulous spots, and becomes comprised among the solid agglomerated bodies of the universe -- we approach a class of phenomena exclusively designated by the form of stars, or as the sidereal world.