ended stratum of stars, but as an actual
aggregation, highly irregular in structure, made up of stellar clouds
and groups and nodosities. All the facts since ascertained fit in with
this conception, to which Proctor added arguments favouring the view,
since adopted by Barnard[1616] and Easton,[1617] that the stars forming
the galactic stream are not only situated more closely together, but are
also really, as well as apparently, of smaller dimensions than the lucid
orbs studding our skies. By the laborious process of isographically
charting the whole of Argelander's 324,000 stars, he brought out in
1871[1618] signs of relationship between the distribution of the
brighter stars and the complex branchings of the Milky Way, which has
been stamped as authentic by Newcomb's recent statistical
inquiries.[1619] There is, besides, a marked condensation of stars,
especially in the southern hemisphere, towards a great circle inclined
some twenty degrees to the galactic plane; and these were supposed by
Gould to form with the sun a subordinate cluster, of which the
components are seen projected upon the sky as a zone of stellar
brilliants.[1620] The zone has, however, galactic rather than solar
affinities, and represents, perhaps, not a group, but a stream.

The idea is gaining ground that the Milky Way is designed, in its main
outlines, on a spiral pattern, and that its various branches and
sections are consequently situated at very different distances from
ourselves. Proctor gave a preliminarily interpretation of their
complexities on this principle, and Easton of Rotterdam[1621] has
renewed the attempt with better success.

A most suggestive delineation of the Milky Way, completed in 1889, after
five years of labour, by Dr. Otto Boedicker, Lord Rosse's astronomer at
Parsonstown, was published by lithography in 1892. It showed a curiously
intricate structure, composed of dimly luminous streams, and shreds, and
patches, intermixed with dark gaps and channels. Ramifications from the
main trunk ran out towards the Andromeda nebula and the "Bee-hive"
cluster in Cancer, involved the Pleiades and Hyades, and, winding round
the constellation of Orion, just attained the Sword-handle nebula. The
last delicate touches had scarcely been put to the picture, when the
laborious eye-and-hand method was, in this quarter, as already in so
many others, superseded by a more expeditious process. Professor Barnard
took the first photographs ever se