"A HOLE IN THE HEAVENS" 149 



after a long awful silence, exclaim, ' Hier ist wahrhaf tig 

 ein Loch in Himmel ! ' l and, as I said before, stopping 

 afterwards at the same spot, but leaving it unsatisfied." 

 The nephew attended to her wishes, rummaged Scorpio 

 with the telescope, and found many blank spaces 

 "without the smallest star. . . . Then come on the 

 globular clusters, then more blank fields, then suddenly 

 the Milky Way comes on in large milky nebulous 

 irregular patches and banks." 



Other Milky Ways than the star-island, to which 

 we belong, " which cannot well be less but are prob- 

 ably much larger," Herschel at one time believed he 

 saw in the white clouds, which float in the depths 

 of space, unseen by the naked eye. Sometimes his 

 telescope resolved them into brilliant star-dust, scat- 

 tered like shining jewels on the dark background of 

 the heavens : and sometimes not. That they are at im- 

 mense, at inconceivable distances from the solar system 

 and from each other, is evident. How far, it would 

 be rash to say. But Herschel's enthusiasm over- 

 leaped all boundaries of prudent reticence. Some of 

 them may be " 600 times the distance of Sirius from 

 us"; other clusters "cannot well be supposed to be 

 at less than six or eight thousand times that distance." 

 Light, the swiftest messenger we know, light, which 

 can journey round the earth eight times in a second, 

 would take six thousand years to bring us a message 

 from the nearest of these clusters, or more than eighty 

 thousand years from the more remote. If his views 

 prove correct, a messenger of wing so swift, and of foot 

 so tireless, may well be regarded as an angel of the 

 Almighty. 



" Here indeed is a hole in the He$yens ! " 



