THK MILKV WAY 143 



thankful. The plan an well as the labour of 

 fstim he content* of the heavens," and lifting 



man's mind to a higher level than it ever attained 

 before, were altogether his own, unleat we add that 

 his devoted sister Caroline shared the labour and, 

 it must be added, the dangers of the work. What 

 ft vista of et litmle was unfolded by 



the muait I lath ! It seemed as if he had built a 



bridge for t h -u - lit to span the gulf which separates the 

 finite from the infinite, the temporal from the eternal, 

 in tliis incredible profusion of suns and systems, of 

 inconceivable spaces and times. 



n-th. breadth, anl thickness of these strata 

 of millions of stars that form the Milky Way, we have 

 he faintest conception. Still 11. i -<;.. i made an 

 ite, which shows the immensity of space covered 

 .is island of stars in the ocean of int f we 



may still presume to speak of it in these terms. 

 the sides of the stratum opposite to our situation in 

 it, where the gauges often run below 5, our nebula" 

 the white cloud called the Milky Way " cannot ex- 

 tend to 100 times the distance o -." But we 

 know now, what Herschel did not know, that light,) 

 i darts from the sun to our earth in right minutes, 1 

 takes about ten years at the same rate to travel j 

 the distance between Sirius and us. One hundred times 

 that distance would be traversed by light in 1000 

 years. And, if the farthest-off stars of the Milky Way 

 are nearly five hundred times as far away from our 

 earth aa Sirius, the swift messenger who brings us 



in would be five thousand years on 

 journey, and could only tell us what was then taking 

 place, not what may be happening now. Herschel 



