Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/184

162. No reason, except its importance to us personally, can be alleged for such a supposition. Every star will have its own appearance of a Galaxy or Milky Way, which will vary according to the situation of the star.

Such an explanation will account for the general appearances of the Milky Way and of the rest of the sky, supposing the stars equally or nearly equally distributed in space. On this supposition, the system must be deeper where the stars appear most numerous.

endeavored, in his early memoirs, to explain this inequality of distribution on the fundamental assumption that the stars were nearly equably distributed in space. If they were so distributed, then the number of stars visible in any gauge would show the thickness of the stellar system in the direction in which the telescope was pointed. At each pointing, the field of view of the instrument includes all the visible stars situated within a cone, having its vertex at the observer's eye, and its base at the very limits of the system, the angle of the cone (at the