Then I can scarcely believe the present shapes, as a better instrument may resolve the thing into another creature altogether. But is there any other sort beside the globular and annular?
Yes; a good many are spiral, or corkscrew form.
Something like a shaving that a plane fetches off a plank, father.
But some of your celestial shavings have a wild look. Clever men have fancied that the star-dust is rolling up that way by a sort of gravitation into a regular form.
What of the two clouds in the heavens opposite to the Southern Cross, down in the south? They look uncommonly like monster Nebulæ.
And monsters indeed they are. In the larger one of them three hundred Nebulæ and globular clusters of stars have been distinguished, and fifty in the smaller one.
Then there is room enough in the Cloud for a whole universe?
Yes, when we find the larger Magellanic Cloud, or Nubecula Major, as it is called, taking up many times the space occupied by the sun in the sky. The Nubecula Minor, or Little cloud, is about one-fourth the size of the larger.
What do you mean by Nubecula?
A little cloud. They are called the Magellanic clouds because first noticed in the voyages of Magellan the Portuguese, three hundred years ago.