176 transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



here it is also familiar as an object which may be seen at the antipodes, 

 thus showing that it extends as a ring around the entire globe, following 

 almost exactly a great circle of the heavens. This is the so-called milky 

 way, which all astronomers tell us consists of tens of millions of separate 

 stars, many of them probably equal to, and some of them larger than, our 

 sun. It is only necessary to look in the same direction on any clear summer 

 night, as twilight is giving place to darkness, before the small stars are 

 visible, to see that almost all the stars then visible lie in a long broad belt 

 from Alpha Centauri to Orion. This is so striking that if you ask anyone 

 what is the distribution of the stars, this feature cannot fail to be observed 

 as a stream of stars. Wait a little longer and observe the milky way : one 

 end of the stream of stars will be found to lie on it, but makes a very small 

 angle with it. Again the winter aspect of the milky way suggests exactly 

 the same idea, with this striking addition, that parts appear to start away 

 from the main ring in a series of streams frequently corresponding with 

 sprays of stars. Again, Proctor says, " that the stars of the first six orders 

 are gathered into two definite regions, a northern and southern, so markedly, 

 that the distribution of stars within these regions is richer than the distribu- 

 tion over the rest of the heavens in the proportion of five to two." Thus 

 the mere naked-eye appearance of the heavens points to its being a definite 

 system, and the older philosophic writers have often called attention to this 

 fact. Wright, Kant, Huygens, and many others expressed themselves 

 strongly on the order of the heavens, and appear to have had no doubt of 

 its being either one or more systems, and several have classified these 

 systems into various orders, of which the visible universe does not appear 

 necessarily to form the highest order. Kant says, speaking of the systems 

 really known, "we trace here the first terms of a series of worlds and systems, 

 and these first terms of an infinite series enable us to infer the nature of the 

 rest of the series." But if the naked-eye view gives it the appearance of a 

 definite system, it will be seen that telescopic observations demonstrate the 

 fact. Sh- J. Herschel, who studied star-distribution more that any other 

 man, says that the mass of stars is generally flat, of small thickness. He 

 also says, that the number of stars visible in his telescope in the milky way 

 number about eighteen miUions, and about two millions in the remainder 

 of the celestial vault. Struve published a list of stars in which he showed 

 that in equal areas there were 4^ at the poles of the galaxy to 122 in the 

 galaxy itself. Herschel also says in another place-^That beyond a certain 

 magnitude all the stars lie in the milky way. There is another feature of 

 the heavens which the telescope reveals to us, namely, the nebulte at the 

 poles of the galaxy, and the star-clusters in the galaxy itself. Mr. Cleve- 

 land Abbe, fi'om Herschel's catalogues, says: — "Imagine a belt thirty 



