Bessel's acuteness in forecasting the direction of coming research was amply verified by the work of Elkin in 1885 at Yale College. Provided with a more modern instrument, but similar to Bessel's, Elkin was able to repeat his observations with a slight increase of precision. Motions in the interval of forty-five years, sufficiently great to hint at coming possibilities, were shown conclusively to exist. Six stars at all events have been fairly excluded from the group on account of their peculiar motions shown by Elkin's research. It is possible that they are merely seen in the background through the interstices of the cluster itself, or they may be suspended between us and the Pleiades, in either case having no real connection with the group. Finally, these observations make it reasonably certain that many of the remaining mass of stars really constitute a unit aggregation in space. Astronomers of a coming generation will again repeat the Besselian work. At present we have been able to use his method only for the separation from the true Pleiades of chance stars that happen to lie in the same direction. Let us hope that man shall exist long enough upon this earth to see the clustered stars themselves begin and carry out such gyrations as gravitation imposes. These will doubtless be of a kind not even suggested by the lesser complexities of our solar system. For the most wonderful thing of all about the Pleiades seems to point to an intricacy of structure whose details may be destined to shake the confidence of the profoundest mathematician. There is an extraordinary nebulous condensation that seems to pervade the entire space occupied by the stellar constituents of the group. The stars are swimming in a veritable sea of luminous cloud. There are filmy tenuous places, and again condensing whirls of material doubtless still in the gaseous or plastic stage. Most noticeable of all are certain almost straight lines of nebula that connect series of stars. In one case, shown upon a photograph made by Henry at Paris, six stars are strung out upon such a hazy line. We might give play to fancy, and see in this the result of some vast eruption of gaseous matter that has already begun to solidify here and there into stellar nuclei. But sound science gives not too great freedom to mere speculative theories. Her duty has been found in quiet research, and her greatest rewards have flowed from imaginative speculation, only when tempered by pure reason. THE POLE-STAR