al
regions of the Southern Hemisphere, describes the coming on of the Milky
Way as seen in his 20-foot reflector. He first remarks 'that all the
stars visible to us, whether by unassisted vision or through the best
telescopes, belong to and form part of a vast stratum or considerably
flattened and unsymmetrical congeries of stars in which our system is
deeply and eccentrically plunged; and, moreover, situated near a point
where the stratum bifurcates or spreads itself out into two sheets.' 'As
the main body of the Milky Way comes on the frequency and variety of
those masses (nebulous) increases; here the Milky Way is composed of
separate or slight or strongly connected clouds of semi-nebulous light,
and, as the telescope moves, the appearance is that of clouds passing in
a scud, as sailors call it.' The Milky Way is like sand, not strewed
evenly as with a sieve, but as if flung down by handfuls (and both hands
at once), leaving dark intervals, and all consisting of stars of the
fourteenth, sixteenth, twentieth magnitudes down to nebulosity, in a
most astonishing manner. After an interval of comparative poverty, the
same phenomenon, and even more remarkable, I cannot say it is nebulous,
it is all resolved, but the stars are inconceivably numerous and minute;
there must be millions and all almost equally massed together. Yet they
nowhere run to nuclei or clusters much brighter in the middle. Towards
the end of the seventeenth hour (Right Ascension) the globular clusters
begin to come in; they consist of stars of excessive minuteness, but
yet not more so than the ground of the Milky Way, on which not only they
appear projected, but of which it is very probable they form a part.
'From the foregoing analysis of the telescopic aspect of the Milky Way
in this interesting region, I think it can hardly be doubted that it
consists of portions differing exceedingly in distance, but brought by
the effect of projection into the same, or nearly the same, visual line;
in particular, that at the anterior edge of what we have called the main
stream, we see foreshortened a vast and illimitable area scattered over
with discontinuous masses and aggregates of stars in the manner of the
cumuli of a mackerel sky, rather than of a stratum of regular thickness
and homogeneous formation.'

The profound distance at which the stars of the Galaxy are situated in
space precludes the possibility of our obtaining any definite knowledge
of their magnit