62 KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



delineated the Milky Way to be, be so far removed from 

 us that the individual stars of which it consists are no 

 longer sensibly distinguishable even by the telescope; if 

 its distance has the same ratio to the distance of the 

 stars of the Milky Way as that of the latter has to the 

 distance of the sun; in short, if such a world of fixed 

 stars is beheld at such an immense distance from the eye 

 of the spectator situated outside of it, then this world 

 will appear under a small angle as a patch of space whose 

 figure will be circular if its plane is presented directly 

 to the eye, and elliptical if it is seen from the side or 

 obliquely. The feebleness of its light, its figure, and the 

 apparent size of its diameter will clearly distinguish such 

 a phenomenon when it is presented, from all the stars 

 that are seen single. 



We do not need to look long for this phenomenon 

 among the observations of the astronomers. It has been 

 distinctly perceived by different observers. They have 

 been astonished at its strangeness; and it has given 

 occasion for conjectures, sometimes to strange hypotheses, 

 and at other times to probable conceptions which, how- 

 ever, were just as groundless as the former. It is the 

 'nebulous' stars which we refer to, or rather a species 

 of them, which M. de Maupertuis thus describes : ' They 

 are,' he says, 'small luminous patches, only a little more 

 brilliant than the dark background of the heavens; they 

 are presented in all quarters; they present the figure of 

 ellipses more or less open; and their light is much feebler 

 than that of any other object we can perceive in the 

 heavens.' 1 



The author of the Astro-Theology imagined that they 

 ^ Discours sur la Figure des Astres. Paris, 1742. 



