The other fourth-magnitude star near Vega is zeta, a wide double, magnitudes fourth and sixth, distance 44", p. 150 deg.. Below we find beta, another very interesting star, since it is both a multiple and an eccentric variable. It has four companions, three of which we can easily see with our three-inch; the fourth calls for the five-inch; the magnitudes are respectively four, seven or under, eight, eight and a half, and eleven; distances 45", p. 150 deg.; 65", p. 320 deg.; 85", p. 20 deg.; and 46", p. 248 deg.. The primary, beta, varies from about magnitude three and a half to magnitude four and a half, the period being twelve days, twenty-one hours, forty-six minutes, and fifty-eight seconds. Two unequal maxima and minima occur within this period. In the spectrum of this star some of the hydrogen lines and the D_3 line (the latter representing helium, a constituent of the sun and of some of the stars, which, until its recent discovery in a few rare minerals was not known to exist on the earth) are bright, but they vary in visibility. Moreover, dark lines due to hydrogen also appear in its spectrum simultaneously with the bright lines of that element. Then, too, the bright lines are sometimes seen double. Professor Pickering's explanation is that beta Lyrae probably consists of two stars, which, like the two composing beta Aurigae, are too close to be separated with any telescope now existing, and that the body which gives the bright lines is revolving in a circle in a period of about twelve days and twenty-two hours around the body which gives the dark lines. He has also suggested that the appearances could be accounted for by supposing a body like our sun to be rotating in twelve days and twenty-two hours, and having attached to it an enormous protuberance extending over more than one hundred and eighty degrees of longitude, so that when one end of it was approaching us with the rotation of the star the other end would be receding, and a splitting of the spectral lines at certain periods would be the consequence. "The variation in light," he adds, "may be caused by the visibility of a larger or smaller portion of this protuberance." Unfortunate star, doomed to carry its parasitical burden of hydrogen and helium, like Sindbad in the clasp of the Old Man of the Sea! Surely, the human imagination is never so wonderful as when it bears an astronomer on its wings. Yet it must be admitted that the facts in this case are well calculated to summon the genius of hypothesis. And the puzzle is hardly simplified by Belopolsky's observation that the body in beta Lyrae giving dark hydrogen lines shows those lines also split at certain times. It has been calculated, from a study of the phenomena noted above, that the bright-line star in beta Lyrae is situated at a distance of about fifteen million miles from the center of gravity of the curiously complicated system of which it forms a part.