We shall begin with a little star just west of the Pleiades, Sigma 412, also called 7 Tauri. This is a triple, but we can see it only as a double, the third star being exceedingly close to the primary. The magnitudes are six and a half, seven, and ten, distances 0.3", p. 216 deg., and 22", p. 62 deg.. In the Pleiades we naturally turn to the brightest star eta, or Alcyone, famous for having once been regarded as the central sun around which our sun and a multitude of other luminaries were supposed to revolve, and picturesque on account of the little triangle of small stars near it which the least telescopic assistance enables us to see. One may derive much pleasure from a study of the various groupings of stars in the Pleiades. Photography has demonstrated, what had long been suspected from occasional glimpses revealed by the telescope, that this celebrated cluster of stars is intermingled with curious forms of nebulae. The nebulous matter appears in festoons, apparently attached to some of the larger stars, such as Alcyone, Merope, and Maia, and in long, narrow, straight lines, the most remarkable of which, a faintly luminous thread starting midway between Maia and Alcyone and running eastward some 40', is beaded with seven or eight stars. The width of this strange nebulous streak is, on an average, 3" or 4", and there is, perhaps, no more wonderful phenomenon anywhere in celestial space. Unfortunately, no telescope is able to show it, and all our knowledge about it is based upon photographs. It might be supposed that it was a nebulous disk seen edgewise, but for the fact that at the largest star involved in its course it bends sharply about 10 deg. out of its former direction, and for the additional fact that it seems to take its origin from a curved offshoot of the intricate nebulous mass surrounding Maia. Exactly at the point where this curve is transformed into a straight line shines a small star! In view of all the facts the idea does not seem to be very far-fetched that in the Pleiades we behold an assemblage of suns, large and small, formed by the gradual condensation of a nebula, and in which evolution has gone on far beyond the stage represented by the Orion nebula, where also a group of stars may be in process of formation out of nebulous matter. If we look a little farther along this line of development, we may perceive in such a stellar assemblage as the cluster in Hercules, a still later phase wherein all the originally scattered material has, perhaps, been absorbed into the starry nuclei. [Illustration: THE CHIEF STARS IN THE PLEIADES.]