Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/183

Rh first, and returning into it again at a distance less than a semicircle. If the bounding surfaces are not parallel planes, but irregularly curved surfaces, analogous appearances must result." The Milky Way, as we see it, presents the aspect which has been just accounted for, in its general appearance of a girdle around the heavens and in its bifurcation at a certain point, and explanation of this appearance, as just given, has never been seriously questioned. One doubtful point remains: are the stars scattered all through space? or are they near its bounding planes, or clustered in any way within this space so as to produce the same result to the eye as if uniformly distributed?

assumed that they were nearly equably arranged all through the space in question. He only examined one other arrangement, viz., that of a ring of stars surrounding the sun, and he pronounced against such an arrangement, for the reason that there is absolutely nothing in the size or brilliancy of the sun to cause us to suppose it to be the centre of such a gigantic