the oldest times;
it is also sometimes called Charles's Wain, the Dipper, or the Plough.
It is always easily seen in England, and seems to swing round the Pole
Star as if held by an invisible rope tied to the Pointers. Besides the
Great Bear there is, not far from it, the Little Bear, which is really
very like it, only smaller and harder to find. The Pole Star is the last
star in its tail; from it two small stars lead away parallel to the
Great Bear, and they bring the eye to a small pair which form one side
of a square just like that in the Great Bear. But the whole of the
Little Bear is turned the opposite way from the Great Bear, and the tail
points in the opposite direction. And when you come to think of it,
it is very ridiculous to have called these groups Bears at all, or to
talk about tails, for bears have no tails! So it would have been better
to have called them foxes or dogs, or almost any other animal rather
than bears.

Now, if you look at the sky on the opposite side of the Pole Star from
the Great Bear, you will see a clearly marked capital W made up of five
or six bright stars. This is called Cassiopeia, or the Lady's Chair.

In looking at Cassiopeia you cannot help noticing that there is a zone
or broad band of very many stars, some exceedingly small, which
apparently runs right across the sky like a ragged hoop, and Cassiopeia
seems to be set in or on it. This band is called the Milky Way, and
crosses not only our northern sky, but the southern sky too, thus making
a broad girdle round the whole universe. It is very wonderful, and no
one has yet been able to explain it. The belt is not uniform and even,
but it is here and there broken up into streamers and chips, having the
same appearance as a piece of ribbon which has been snipped about by
scissors in pure mischief; or it may be compared to a great river broken
up into many channels by rocks and obstacles in its course.

The Milky Way is mainly made up of thousands and thousands of small
stars, and many more are revealed by the telescope; but, as we see in
Cassiopeia, there are large bright stars in it too, though, of course,
these may be infinitely nearer to us, and may only appear to us to be in
the Milky Way because they are between us and it.

Now, besides the few constellations that I have mentioned, there are
numbers of others, some of which are difficult to discover, as they
contain no bright stars. But there are certain constellations which