Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 240, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1911 — THE SPIRAL NEBULAE. [ARTICLE]

THE SPIRAL NEBULAE.

On* of tho Terrifying and Mysterious Forces of Space. The most stupendous manifestations of force of which we have any knowledge are presented by the spiral nebulae. whose mysterious and terrifying forms were first clearly revealed by the Lick observatory photographs made in 1893-1900 by the late Professor James E. Keeler. The heavens are full of them—they exist by thousands—and as astronomical photography is. brought to greater perfection their amazing shapes tend more and more to upset all former ideas concerning the processes of creation and destruction going on in the interstellar spaces. They affect in an equal degree all theories about the origin and ultimate fate of our own solar system. Who would imagine en looking up at the starry heavens some quiet night that the earth is like a person lost in the midst of the whirring wheel% and spinning shafts of some enormous mill or machine room, where running holts. whirling spindles, champing pistons, grinding cogs, gyrating governors, dizzying flywheels and leaping rods confuse the eye and the mind and paralyze the limbs with the terror of impending annihilation? We are not aware of this startling situation because, while we see the stars, we do not see wbut is among, the stars. The spinning machinery of the universe is revealed only in photographs, and as far as our senses are concerned it performs Its functions with a silence which to the Imagination becomes a part of the horror of space. These cosmic wheels spin with incalculable velocity, but the span of human life is but a second of time in comparison with their periods. If we could magnify time so that a second would become as a century, then an hour would he equivalent to 360,000 years, and the true aspect of the spiral nebulae would burst upon our astonished senses.-Garrett P. Serviss in New York. American.