The well-known ``Trifid Nebula'' is also included in the
field of the photograph, which covers a truly marvelous region, so
intricate in its mingling of nebul?, star-clusters, star-swarms,
star-streams, and dark vacancies that no description can do it
justice. Yet, chaotic as it appears, there is an unmistakable
suggestion of unity about it, impressing the beholder with the idea
that all the different parts are in some way connected, and have not
been fortuitously thrown together. Miss Agnes M. Clerke made the
striking remark that the dusky lanes in M8 are exemplified on the
largest scale in the great rift dividing the Milky Way, from Cygnus in
the northern hemisphere all the way to the ``Cross'' in the southern.
Similar lanes are found in many other clusters, and they are generally
associated with flanking rows of stars, resembling in their
arrangement the thick-set houses and villas along the roadways that
traverse the approaches to a great city.
But to return to the black gaps. Are they really windows in the
star-walls of the universe? Some of them look rather as if they had
been made by a shell fired through a luminous target, allowing the eye
to range through the hole into the void space beyond. If science is
discretely silent about these things, what can the more venturesome
and less responsible imagination suggest? Would a huge ``runaway
sun,'' like Arcturus, for instance, make such an opening if it should
pass like a projectile through the Milky Way? It is at least a
stimulating inquiry.
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