ltered with the change
in the point of view, there would still be one familiar element in
that the new-found planets would be near by, and the nearest fixed
stars far away in the firmament.

With the speed of light a stellar voyage could be taken along the path
of the Milky Way, which would endure for thousands of years. Through
all the course the journeyer would perceive the same vast girdle of
stars, faint because they were far away, which gives the dim light of
our galaxy. At no point is it probable that he would find the separate
suns much more aggregated or greatly farther apart than they are in
that part of the Milky Way which our sun now occupies. Looking forth
on either side of the "galactic plane," there would be the same
scattering of stars which we now behold when we gaze at right angles
to the way we are supposing the spirit to traverse.

As the form of the Milky Way is irregular, the mass, indeed, having
certain curious divisions and branches, it well might be that the
supposed path would occasionally pass on one or the other side of the
vast star layer. In such positions the eye would look forth into an
empty firmament, except that there might be in the far away, tens of
thousands of years perhaps at the rate that light travels away from
the observer, other galaxies or Milky Ways essentially like that which
he was traversing. At some point the journeyer would attain the margin
of our star stratum, whence again he would look forth into the
unpeopled heavens, though even there he might discern other remote
star groups separated from his own by great void intervals.

* * * * *

The revelations of the telescope show us certain features in the
constitution and movements of the fixed stars which now demand our
attention. In the first place, it is plain that not all of these
bodies are in the same physical condition. Though the greater part of
these distant luminous masses are evidently in the state of
aggregation displayed by our own sun, many of them retain more or less
of that vaporous, it may be dustlike, character which we suppose to
have been the ancient state of all the matter in the universe. Some of
these masses appear as faint, almost indistinguishable clouds, which
even to the greatest telescope and the best-trained vision show no
distinct features of structure. In other cases the nebulous
appearance is hardly more than a mist about a tolerably distinct
ce