We have now, not described, but only mentioned, some division of the labors of the New Astronomy in its photometric, spectroscopic, and photographic stellar researches, on each of which as many books, rather than chapters, might be written, to give only what is novel and of current interest. But these are themselves but a part of the modern work that has overturned or modified almost every conception about the stellar universe which was familiar to the last generation, or which perhaps we were taught in our own youth. * * * * * In considering the results to be drawn from this glance we have taken at some facts of modern observation, if it be asked, not only what the facts are, but what lessons the facts themselves have to teach, there is more than one answer, for the moral of a story depends on the one who draws it, and we may look on our story of the heavens from the point of view either of our own importance or of our own insignificance. In the one case we behold the universe as a sort of reflex of our own selves, mirroring in vast proportions of time and space our own destiny; and even from this standpoint, one of the lessons of our subject is surely that there is no permanence in any created thing. When primitive man learned that with lapsing years the oak withered and the very rock decayed, more slowly but as surely as himself, he looked up to the stars as the types of contrast to the change he shared, and fondly deemed them eternal; but now we have found change there, and that probably the star clusters and the nebulæ, even if clouds of suns and worlds, are fixed only by comparison with our own brief years, and, tried by the terms of their own long existence, are fleeting like ourselves. “We have often witnessed the formation of a cloud in a serene sky. A hazy point barely perceptible--a little wreath of mist increases in volume and becomes darker and denser, until it obscures a large portion of the heavens. It throws itself into fantastic shapes, it gathers a glory from the sun, is borne onward by the wind, and as it gradually came, so, perhaps, it gradually disappears, melting away in the untroubled air. But the universe is nothing more than such a cloud,--a cloud of suns and worlds. Supremely grand though it may seem to us, to the infinite and eternal intellect it is no more than a fleeting mist. If there be a succession of worlds in infinite space, there is also a succession of worlds in infinite time. As one after another cloud replaces clouds in the skies, so this starry system, the universe, is the successor of countless others that have preceded it,--the predecessor of countless others that will follow.”