Then take the famous Andromeda Nebula (see Frontispiece), which is so vast that notwithstanding its immense distance even the naked eye perceives it as an enigmatical wisp in the sky. Its image on the sensitive plate is the masterpiece of astronomical photography; for wild, incomprehensible beauty there is nothing that can be compared with it. Here, if anywhere, we look upon the spectacle of creation in one of its earliest stages. The Andromeda Nebula is apparently less advanced toward transformation into stellar bodies than is that in Triangulum. The immense crowd of stars sprinkled over it and its neighborhood seem in the main to lie this side of the nebula, and consequently to have no connection with it. But incipient stars (in some places clusters of them) are seen in the nebulous rings, while one or two huge masses seem to give promise of transformation into stellar bodies of unusual magnitude. I say “rings” because although the loops encompassing the Andromeda Nebula have been called spirals by those who wish utterly to demolish Laplace’s hypothesis, yet they are not manifestly such, as can be seen on comparing them with the undoubted spirals of the Lord Rosse Nebula. They look quite as much like circles or ellipses seen at an angle of, say, fifteen or twenty degrees to their plane. If they are truly elliptical they accord fairly well with Laplace’s idea, except that the scale of magnitude is stupendous, and if the Andromeda Nebula is to become a solar system it will surpass ours in grandeur beyond all possibility of comparison. [Illustration: Nebula in Cetus]