Every astronomer must many times have found himself marveling
at it in those comparatively rare nights when it shows all its beauty
and all its strangeness. In its great broken rifts, divisions, and
spirals are found the gigantic prototypes of similar forms in its
star-clouds and clusters. As we have said, it determines the general
shape of the whole sidereal system. Some of the brightest stars in the
sky appear to hang like jewels suspended at the ends of tassels
dropped from the Galaxy. Among these pendants are the Pleiades and the
Hyades. Orion, too, the ``Mighty Hunter,'' is caught in ``a loop of
light'' thrown out from it. The majority of the great first-magnitude
stars seem related to it, as if they formed an inner ring inclined at
an angle of some twenty degrees to its plane. Many of the long curves
that set off from it on both sides are accompanied by corresponding
curves of lucid stars. In a word, it offers every appearance of
structural connection with the entire starry system. That the universe
should have assumed the form of a wreath is certainly a matter for
astonishment; but it would have been still more astonishing if it had
been a cube, a rhomboid, or a dodecahedron, for then we should have
had to suppose that something resembling the forces that shape
crystals had acted upon the stars, and the difficulty of explaining
the universe by the laws of gravitation would have been increased.
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