The Milky Way ¹

Abstract

IT may be that the limitations imposed upon us by restrictions in time and space will never allow a complete solution of the problems offered by the study of the sidereal universe. But the effort to comprehend the processes that have contributed to its structure, or to penetrate the mystery that conceals its destiny, will not be abandoned on account of the difficulty of the problem or the dearth of pertinent facts. There may be little hope that our observations and those of our predecessors will prove adequate to the task of reading the riddle, but the human mind needs very little information to tempt it to form conjectures concerning the order of creation in its widest extent. In this department of science, history unfortunately bears witness rather to the richness of our imagination than to our skill in securing facts. But in recent times, as the contents of the two works under notice show, the tendency has been to limit our excursions into the unknown, and to substitute exact inquiry directed to a definite end, in place of the loose, but possibly plausible, suggestions that did duty for critical examination. In the first-mentioned work M. Stroo-bant is content to count the stars the positions, of which have been recorded in connection with the scheme for the construction of the photographic chart of the heavens. Such work is no doubt tedious and unheroic, but it is eminently useful, and more welcome than any random speculations, however brilliant or startling they might be. The object the author had in view in undertaking this wearisome task was to determine the law of stellar distribution, both on the o chart and in the catalogue, according to variation of galactic latitude. For the present the research is limited to the stars in the zones taken at the observatories of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Algiers, and San Fernando. Of the star charts 879 have been used, containing the total of 985,430 images; and of the catalogue negatives 535, which show the places of 163,009 stars. The celestial surface scrutinised contains 4126 square degrees, approximately one-tenth of the entire surface of the sphere.