A SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY.* 
By AGNES M. CLERKE. 
On Tuesday, August 21, 1888, the Union steamship Mexican crossed 
the line outward-bound for the cape, and a certain proportion of her 
passengers, amongst whom was the present writer, found themselves 
for the first time in the southern hemisphere. A few nights later, halt 
an hour’s darkness before moonrise gave time for a splendid display of 
unfamiliar stars. The Southern Cross lay prone toward the west; 
Alpha and Beta Centauri shone triumphantly above it; Achernar was 
climbing the sky on the other side of a pole singularly denuded of 
bright companionship; the lucid streams and knots of the Milky Way 
were reflected in a pearly shimmer from gently heaving waves, the 
brilliant effect of the entire sidereal landscape being enhanced by the 
presence of Jupiter and Mars close together in Scorpio, while the dim 
cone of the Zodiacal Light, tapering upward from the sun’s place, faded 
out above them on the black background of the sky. 
The “four stars,” 
Non viste mai fuor ch’ alla prima gente, 
appealed to mediwval imagination as a symbol and a prophecy of the 
uplifting of the Cross in the waste places of the earth. Modern trav- 
ellers regard them from a more prosaic point of view, and are apt to be 
‘** disappointed” at their unequal luster and slightly unsymmetrical 
arrangement. The firmament they help to adorn, however, is of a 
splendor at first sight absolutely startling, and at all times peculiarly 
suggestive. The dullest mind can hardly fail to be roused to wonder 
by the appearance of the galaxy as it extends past Sirius amidst the 
grand procession of the stars in Argo, or where the great rift in its 
structure spans the heavens from the Centaur tothe Swan. The intri- 
cacy of its branches, the curdled texture of its surface, the stupendous 
collection of distant suns, almost palpably rounded out from the void 
of space in Sagittarius; the abrupt vacuity of the “ Coalsack,” recall- 
ing the dark “lanes” tunneling certain nebule and star clusters, invite, 
only to baffle, speculations, which the tempting analogues presented by 
the never-setting Magellanic Clouds, with their mixed contents of stars 
and nebule, help further to stimulate. 
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