190 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou ITT. 
Superior, with less romance, called the Pleiades Madodisson or the sweat- 
ing stones, referring to the hot stones arranged in a group in their vapour 
baths. 
Only six Pleiades are usually seen, though as many as sixteen have 
been made out by keen observers without artificial aid (Mr. A. M. 
Clarke’s article on The Pletades, in Nature, April 15, 1886, Vol. 33, p. 
561.) Hipparchus mentions the possibility of discovering a seventh 
member of the group, Ovid too, “Quae septem dici, sex tamen esse 
solent.” 
The story of the “ Lost Pleiad” is immeasurably antique and cosmo- 
politan as a myth or a tradition. The Pleiades are included in the 
great constellation of the Bull. 
They are with us a winter constellation. Their position is best found 
by following with the eye the line made by the belt of Orion northward 
past Aldebaran and the Hyades. 
Alcyoné is of the third magnitude, but was not 1750 years ago the 
lucida of the collection. The leading place was first assigned to Alcyoné 
by Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century. Galileo detected nearly fifty 
stars in the Pleiades. M. C. Wolf, in 1875, at Paris, made a chart which 
included stars to the fourteenth magnitude to the number of six hundred 
and twenty-five, contained in a rectangle 135’x90, in which Alcyoné 
occupies a nearly central position. By the photographic object glass, 
stars of the Pleiades down to the seventeenth magnitude have been 
deciphered, and more than one thousand four hundred have been placed 
on the photographic retina. 
The Pleiades are immensely far off. None of them has any sensible 
parallax, nor are we informed of their intrinsic lustre, mutual distance or 
gravitating mass. Recent investigations of the structure of the Pleiades 
group shew a surprising miniature sidereal system, the richness and variety 
of which bewilder theoretical conceptions, and recall as anomalous the 
accumulated wonders of the Magellanic clouds. Groups are collected 
within the main groups, systems revolve apart, the subordination of which 
to the laws of a general federative union, leaves their internal liberty of 
movement unshackled. 
The furthest of the suns forming the group are seventy-one times as. 
distant from us as from the centre of their own system ; consequently 
Alcyoné blazes upon them with five thousand times the brilliancy of 
Sirius. “It would seem,” says Mr. Clark, “a star rather than a sun.” 
A learned Canadian, of eminent name and lineage, Mr. R. G. Halibur- 
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