The Athens Post

The Milky Way.—This well known phenomenon is a great luminous band which every evening stretches across the sky. At one part it sends off a kind of branch which again unites with the main body, after remaining distant for about one hundred and fifty degrees. This remarkable belt has, from the earliest ages of which we have any record, maintained the same place among the stars; and when examined through a powerful telescope, it is found to be composed of myriads of glittering stars, scattered in groups of millions, like glittering dust, on the back ground of the general heavens.—Sir William Herschel has divided it into a number of nebulous systems, or separate clusters of stars, and has described their appearances and shapes; but, as yet, it is to us but the shadowy outline of another branch of astronomical research which will require more powerful instruments and more human genius than is now at command for its exploration. The same authority above referred to, thinks that the phenomena of the milky way agree with the supposition that the stars of our firmament, instead of being scattered in all directions indifferently through space, form a stratum, of which the thickness is small in comparison with its length and breadth, and which the earth occupies a place somewhere about the middle of its thickness.