ADVANCE OF ASTRONOMY. 199 



at a rate which some estimate at 12-18 miles per 

 second. There has been no justification of the hope 

 of a century ago that some star (Sirius was suggested 

 by Kant) or some point (in the Pleiades, according 

 to Madler) would turn out to be the hub of the uni- 

 verse, the centre to which all the heavenly bodies are 

 related; the system or goal of the grandest of all 

 movements is unknown. 



EXTENSION AND INTENSIFYING OF OBSERVATION. 



Extension of Observational Astronomy. — In as- 

 tronomy, as in other sciences, a large part of the 

 available intellectual energy has gone and must go 

 to extend the area of observation, or to revise with 

 intensified carefulness Avhat has been already ob- 

 served. It is difficult to give any account of this 

 ungeneralised work, whose value is in the future 

 rather than in the present. Numbering the stars is 

 like cataloguing Radiolarians or Diatoms, a means 

 not an end ; and a telescopic photograph of a corner 

 of the Milky Way is like a similar picture of a micro- 

 scopic section — interesting and marvellous, of course, 

 for everything is — but not attaining full interest 

 until it can be used as an item in some generalisa- 

 tion. 



The Milky Way. — To take an instance : The Milky 

 Way — the high road to Olympus — has been the sub- 

 ject of imaginings since men first saw the stars. Its 

 poetical interpretations are many, but as to its sci- 

 entific interpretations there has been little progress 

 since Galilei's telescope confirmed the conjecture of 

 Pythagoras that the haze of the dimly luminous arch 

 was " the combined shimmer of hosts of stars, each 

 one too faint by itself to be distinguished by the 

 unaided eye.'' 



