148 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



to occasion many subdivisions." In fact, he " ascribes 

 a certain air of youth and vigour to many very re- 

 gularly scattered regions in our sidereal stratum." He 

 imagined also that " some parts of our system seem to 

 have sustained greater ravages of time than others," 

 so much so that " in the body of the Scorpion is an 

 opening or hole " of at least four degrees broad, through 

 which, as through a window, infinite space can be sur- 

 veyed outside, till telescopes of greater power pierce the 

 darkness, and, it may be, reveal to our eye Milky 

 Ways in the far Beyond. One of them, near the con- 

 stellation called the Southern Cross, had long been 

 familiar to sailors in southern seas as the Coal Sack 

 of the Milky Way, a pear-shaped oval almost destitute 

 of stars, with which the regions around are crowded 

 and brilliant. "The purity and clearness of the 

 heavens are remarkable," he says, "when we look 

 out of our stratum at the sides towards Leo and 

 Virgo on the one hand, and Cetus on the other; 

 whereas the ground of the heavens becomes troubled 

 as we approach towards the length or height of it." 

 These troubled appearances seemed to arise "from 

 distant, straggling stars that yield hardly light enough," 

 till, after a long examination of these troubled spots, 

 the eye gets accustomed to the dimness, and the stars 

 that caused the troubling come into view. 



When Sir John Herschel went to the Cape of Good 

 Hope in 1833, to survey the southern heavens as his 

 father had surveyed the northern half a century before, 

 his aunt Caroline wrote to him, "It is not clusters of 

 stars I want you to discover in the body of the Scorpion 

 (or thereabout), for that does not answer my expect- 

 ation, remembering having once heard your father, 



