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38 THE SIDEEEAL UNIVERSE. 



detached from the Milky Way, are two bright spots which 

 southern navigators have designated by the name of " Magel- 

 lan's Clouds" During his astronomical residence at the Cape 

 of Good Hope some years ago, Sir John Herschel, by the aid 

 of his twenty feet telescope, succeeded in analyzing these ob- 

 jects, and found that each of them, and especially the larger 

 one, was a system of firmaments, combining many extensive 

 clusters into one! Of these, as systems, analogy would 

 authorize us -to predicate internal gravity and general and par- 

 ticular rotatory and orbitual motions. But the magnitude of 

 this complex unity, however inconceivably great, may, after 

 all, be but an atom in the immensity of ulterior creations to 

 which it belongs ; and, on the bases of its analogies, we may 

 rise to the ideal of a still higher system a system which may 

 be supposed to embrace in its structure all the firmamental 

 clusters, nebulae, and systems of systems heretofore known to 

 telescopic observers, and countless more besides. 



Nor is the idea of such an all-comprehensive system of sys- 

 tems without the support of facts, as well as of analogies. It is 

 said that although nebulae, resolvable and irresolvable, appear 

 in every quarter of the heavens, they appear in greatest 

 abundance in a comparatively narrow zone which encircles 

 the heavens, cutting the plane of the Milky Way at right 

 angles. This arrangement goes far to establish the idea of a 

 Frimament of firmaments, a Galaxy of galaxies, in which all 

 sidereal creations which have come within the reach of the 

 most powerful telescopes, are bound together in one common 

 structure, brought within the sphere of the same common laws, 

 and made to observe throughout, similar rotatory and orbitual 

 motions with those which prevail in our own solar sys- 

 tem, which latter may be considered as an epitome 

 representative of the whole ! 



