Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/404

332 he began to study the sidereal system per se and the mutual relations of its members. From this point of view the sun, with its attendant planets, became one of an innumerable host of stars, which happened to have received a fictitious importance from the accident that we inhabited one member of its system.

258. A complete knowledge of the positions in space of the stars would of course follow from the measurement of the parallax (chapter, § 129 and chapter , § 207) of each. The failure of such astronomers as Bradley to get the parallax of any one star was enough to shew the hopelessness of this general undertaking, and, although Herschel did make an attack on the parallax problem (§ 263), he saw that the question of stellar distribution in space, if to be answered at all, required some simpler if less reliable method capable of application on a large scale.

Accordingly he devised (1784) his method of star-gauging. The most superficial view of the sky shews that the stars visible to the naked eye are very unequally distributed on the celestial sphere; the same is true when the fainter stars visible in a telescope are taken into account. If two portions of the sky of the same apparent or angular magnitude are compared, it may be found that the first contains many times as many stars as the second. If we realise that the stars are not actually on a sphere but are scattered through space at different distances from us, we can explain this inequality of distribution on the sky as due to either a real inequality of distribution in space, or to a difference in the distance to which the sidereal system extends in the directions in which the two sets of stars lie. The first region on the sky may correspond to a region of space in which the stars are really clustered together, or may represent a direction in which the sidereal system extends to a greater distance, so that the accumulation of layer after layer of stars lying behind one another produces the apparent density of distribution. In the same way, if we are standing in a wood and the wood appears less thick in one direction than in another, it may be because the trees are really more thinly planted there or because in that direction the edge of the wood is nearer.

In the absence of any a priori knowledge of the actual