SECT, xxxvii.] SPLLENDOUR OF MILKY WAY. 43$ 



towards the centre, and, as its light is not more to the naked 

 eye than that of a star of the 4th or 5th magnitude, their 

 minuteness is extreme. It has a dark hole in its centre, 

 with a bridge of stars across, a circumstance peculiar to 

 this cluster. 



Lacaille's globular cluster, or 47 Toucani, is completely 

 insulated in a very dark part of the sky not far from the 

 lesser of the Magellanic clouds. The stars which are of 

 the 14th magnitude, immensely numerous, compressed and 

 white, form three distinct stages round a centre, where they 

 suddenly change in hue, and form a blaze of rose-coloured 

 light. Ope cluster consists of large ruddy stars and small 

 white ones ; another of greater beauty consists of shells or 

 coats of stars of the llth and 15th magnitude. There are 

 thirty globular clusters of extreme beauty collected within 

 a circular space of not more tljan eighteen degrees radius, 

 which lies in the part of the sky occupied by the constella- 

 tions Corona Australis, the body and head of Sagittarius, 

 the tail of Scorpio, part of Telescopium and Ara. The 

 Milky Way passes diametrically across the circular area in 

 question, which gives prodigious brilliancy to this part of 

 the sky. For besides these globular clusters, which all lie 

 in the starry part, and not in the dark spaces, these 

 are the only two annular nebulae in the southern hemi- 

 sphere. No part of the heavens is fuller of objects beauti- 

 ful and remarkable in themselves, and rendered still 

 more so by their mode of association, and by the peculiar 

 features assumed by the Milky Way, which are without 

 a parallel for richness and magnificence in any other 

 part of the heavens. Some of the globular clusters are so 

 remote that the stars are scarcely discernible mere star 

 dust. There is a double globular cluster in the southern 

 hemisphere of very small dimensions and separated by a 

 minute interval, a combination which suggests the idea of 

 a globular cluster revolving about a very oblate spheroidal 

 one in the plane of the equator, and in an orbit which is 



