Northeast of Denebola lies the small constellation of Coma Berenices, “Berenice’s Hair,” remarkable for the confused glitter of the small scattered stars of which it consists. It is a constellation with a romantic history which I shall not retell here. It forms an attraction for an opera-glass. We now return to the region of sky above the head of Hydra, west of the meridian. There the attention is arrested by a glimmering spot, a kind of starry cobweb, which represents the “Beehive” cluster in Cancer. Its classical name is _Præsepe_, the “Manger.” In _Astronomy with the Naked Eye_ will be found a copy of Galileo’s drawing of the stars of Præsepe as they appeared to him with his newly invented telescope. It is delightful to look at them on a clear night with a large opera-glass or a small telescope. They are an example of that clustering tendency so often seen among the stars, and which reaches its most wonderful manifestations in such assemblages as the famous globular clusters in Hercules and Centaurus, where countless thousands of small stars appear to be so crowded together that in the centre they run up into a perfect blaze. But in Præsepe there is no such apparent crowding, though the stars are so numerous that they resemble a swarm of bees. The probability is that none of the stars in this company is as large as our sun--although we cannot be perfectly sure because we do not know their distance--but they are, nevertheless, true stellar bodies, solar children, which seem playing together, overwatched by larger stars, waiting not far away. Plato, or his disciples, taking the suggestion from older dreamers, regarded Præsepe as a gateway of souls through which descended the spirits that were to animate the bodies of men during their earthly life. There are moods in which one can hardly consider our coldly scientific way of treating such celestial wonders as being essentially superior to the more spiritual ideas and suggestions of the visionaries of antiquity, before man became possessed with the notion that all science is summed up in measurement. Unquestionably we have more “facts,” but have we more inspiration? Are we as near to the stars as were those who knew less about them? Have we yet got the key to unlock the universe? Do many of us comprehend the _dictum_ of one of our own modern sages--“Hitch your wagon to a star”? Cancer has no conspicuous stars, and it covers but a small space on the sky, yet as a constellation it is as old as any, and it has given us our “Tropic of Cancer,” because in ancient times, before the Precession of the Equinoxes had drifted the zodiacal signs and constellations apart, the place of the Summer Solstice, where the sun is at its northern extreme of declination, was situated in Cancer, though now we find it in Gemini, close to the borders of Taurus.