Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/160

148 to occasion many subdivisions." In fact, he "ascribes a certain air of youth and vigour to many very regularly scattered regions in our sidereal stratum." He imagined also that "some parts of our system seem to have sustained greater ravages of time than others," so much so that "in the body of the Scorpion is an opening or hole" of at least four degrees broad, through which, as through a window, infinite space can be surveyed outside, till telescopes of greater power pierce the darkness, and, it may be, reveal to our eye Milky Ways in the far Beyond. One of them, near the constellation called the Southern Cross, had long been familiar to sailors in southern seas as the Coal Sack of the Milky Way, a pear-shaped oval almost destitute of stars, with which the regions around are crowded and brilliant. "The purity and clearness of the heavens are remarkable," he says, "when we look out of our stratum at the sides towards Leo and Virgo on the one hand, and Cetus on the other; whereas the ground of the heavens becomes troubled as we approach towards the length or height of it." These troubled appearances seemed to arise "from distant, straggling stars that yield hardly light enough," till, after a long examination of these troubled spots, the eye gets accustomed to the dimness, and the stars that caused the troubling come into view.

When Sir John Herschel went to the Cape of Good Hope in 1833, to survey the southern heavens as his father had surveyed the northern half a century before, his aunt Caroline wrote to him, "It is not clusters of stars I want you to discover in the body of the Scorpion (or thereabout), for that does not answer my expectation, remembering having once heard your father,