80 CELESTIAL PHENOMENA. 



and nearly in the middle of the starry stratum in the direction 

 of its thickness. 



The place of our solar system, and the form of the whole 

 lens, are inferred from a kind of stellar scale, i. e., from the 

 different number of stars seen (as already alluded to) in equal 

 telescopic fields of view. The greater or less number of 

 stars measures the relative depth of the stratum in different 

 directions ; giving, in each case, like the marks on a sound- 

 ing line, the comparative length of visual ray required to 

 reach the bottom ; or, more properly, as above and below do 

 not here apply, the outer limit of the sidereal stratum. In 

 the direction of the major axis, where the greater number of 

 stars are placed behind each other, the remoter ones appear 

 closely crowded together, and, as it were, united by a milky 

 radiance, and present a zone, or belt, projected on the 

 visible celestial vault, or sky. This narrow belt is divided 

 into branches ; and its beautiful, but not uniform, brightness 

 is interrupted by some dark places. As seen by us on the 

 apparent concave celestial sphere, it deviates only a few 

 degrees from a great circle, as we are near the middle 

 of the cluster, and almost in the plane of the milky 

 way. If our planetary system was far outside the cluster, the 

 milky way would appear to telescopic vision as a ring, and, 

 at a still greater distance, as a resolvable disk-shaped nebula. 



Among the many self-luminous moving suns (erroneously 

 called fixed stars), of which our starry island, or nebula, 

 consists, our own sun is the only one known to us by direct 

 observation as a central body, in its relations to spherically- 

 agglomerated matter, revolving around it under the manifold 

 forms of planets, comets, and aerolite-asteroids. In the 

 multiple stars (double stars, or double suns), so far as we 



