386 MILKY WAY. SECT. XXXVI. 



that of Antinous, is a blaze of light, strangely interrupted, how- 

 ever, with vacant and entirely starless patches, especially in 

 Scorpio, near a Centauri and the Cross, while to the north it 

 fades away pale and dim, and is in comparison hardly traceable. 

 I think it is impossible to view this splendid zone, with the 

 astonishingly rich and evenly distributed fringe of stars of the 

 3rd and 4th magnitude, which forms a broad skirt to its southern 

 border like a vast curtain, without an impression amounting 

 almost to conviction, that the Milky Way is not a mere stratum, 

 but annular, or at least that our system is placed within one of 

 the poorer or almost vacant parts of its general mass, and that 

 eccentrically, so as to be much nearer to the region about the 

 Cross than to that diametrically opposite to it." 



Those dark vacuities called " Coal Sacks " by the ancient 

 navigators, which are so numerous between a Centauri and 

 a Antaris, are among the most extraordinary phenomena in the 

 southern hemisphere ; they are of intense blackness, though by 

 no means void of extremely small telescopic stars ; the darkness 

 arises from the contrast these nearly vacant spaces form with 

 the excessive brilliancy of the surrounding part of the Milky 

 Way, and the sudden sharp transition from light to darkness. 

 The largest and most conspicuous of them is a pear-shaped 

 vacuity close to the Southern Cross. That portion of the Milky 

 Way that is split longitudinally through its centre lies between 

 a Centauri and the constellation of Cygnus : the two bands are 

 joined here and there by narrow bridges of condensed stars, 

 stretching across the darker space between them. In Scorpio 

 and Sagittarius Sir John Herschel describes the Milky Way as 

 composed of definite clouds of light running into clusters of 

 extremely minute stars like sand, not strewed evenly as with a 

 sieve, but as if thrown down by handfuls, and by both hands at 

 once, leaving dark intervals. In this astonishing profusion the 

 stars are of all sizes, from the 14th to the 20th magnitude, and 

 even down to nebulosity. After an interval the same profusion 

 is renewed, the stars being inconceivably minute and numerous 

 beyond description they are in millions and millions. Thus 

 there is great irregularity in their diffusion as well as magnitude 

 in some places intensely crowded, in others the deep blackness 

 of the sky, over which they are thinly scattered, irresistibly led 

 to believe that in these regions the power of our telescopes fairly 



