Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/528

396 seems a vast zone-shaped nebula nearly a great circle of the sphere, the poles being in Coma and Cetus."

The Milky Way has been likened to sand strewn not 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 14th, 16th, and 20th magnitudes down to nebulosity.

It is believed that the majority of stars comprising this wonderful belt of stars surpass our sun in brilliancy and splendour. In the deep recesses of this glittering way Sir Wm. Herschel was able to count five hundred stars receding in regular order behind each other, and in the interval of an hour 116,000 stars passed him in review across the field of his telescopic vision.

In the constellation Cygnus, where the Milky Way is especially brilliant, there is a region about five degrees in breadth which contains, it is said, 331,000 stars.

Prof. Russell writing of this region says: "Here the Milky Way is crossed by a dark streak which immediately suggests a passing cloud. But, year in and year out, on the clearest nights, the dark region is there. Its origin must be interstellar space—perhaps in an actual thinning of the stars of the Galaxy, perhaps in the interposition of some cosmic cloud of overwhelming vast dimensions."

Many think the Galaxy a universe by itself and our sun one of its myriad stars.

"It remains the most wonderful sight that human eyes behold. The thought of its wonderful structure, the contemplation of the splendour proximity would afford, transcends the very limits of the human intellect, and gives us a mere glimpse in imagination of the stupendous scale of a universe of which our system is but an infinitesimal atom."

The following are some of the titles bestowed on the Milky Way, and various fancies concerning it:

The Akkadians imagined it to be a Great Serpent, and the River of the Divine Lady.

The Greeks called it "the Circle of the Galaxy."