MILKY WAY. 203 



stars), have led the most recent investigator of the southern 

 hemisphere to remarkable views and probable results in re- 

 ference to the form of the galactic annular system, and 

 what has been boldly called the sun's place in the world- 

 island to which this annular system belongs. The place 

 assigned to the sun is eccentric, and probably near a point 

 where the stratum bifurcates or spreads itself out into two 

 sheets, 98 in one of those desert regions lying nearer to the 

 Southern Cross than to the opposite node of the Milky Way." 

 " The depth at which our system is plunged in the sidereal 

 stratum, constituting the galaxy, reckoning from the southern 

 surface or limit of that stratum, is about equal to that distance 

 which on a general average corresponds to the light of a star 

 of the 9th or 10th magnitude, and certainly does not exceed 

 that corresponding to the llth." 100 Where, from the peculiar 

 nature of individual problems, measurements and the direct 

 evidence of the senses fail, we see but dimly those results which 

 intellectual contemplation, urged forward by an intuitive im- 

 pulse, is ever striving to attain. 



98 Sir William Herschel, in the Philos. Transact, for 1785, 

 p. 21; Sir John Herschel, Observations at the Cape, 293. 

 Compare also Struve, Descr, de I" Observatoire de Poulkova, 

 1845, pp. 267-271. 



99 " I think," says Sir John Herschel, " it is impossible to 

 view this splendid zone from a Centauri to the Cross without 

 an impression amounting almost to conviction, that the 

 Milky Way is not a mere^ stratum, but annular; or, at least, 

 that our system is placed within one of the poorer or almost 

 vacant parts of its general mass, and that eccentrically, so as 

 to be much nearer to the region about the Cross than to that 

 diametrically opposite to it." (Mary Somerville, On the 

 Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1846, p. 419.) 



* Observations at the Cape, 315. 



