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Not only to the ordinary beholder, but to the learned student of the heavens, the most wonderful feature of the sky is the Milky Way. This is a girdle apparently spanning the sky and perhaps, in reality, spanning the entire universe of stars, uniting them, as it were, into a single system—one "stupendous whole." It may be seen at some time of the night every day of the year, and at some convenient hour in the evening of every month except May. During this month it extends round the horizon in the early evening, and is invisible through the denser strata of the air. Of course it will even then become visible in the east and northeast later at night.

The smallest telescope will show the Milky Way to be formed of immense congeries of stars, too faint in their light to be separately visible at their great distance from us. Careful observation, even with the naked eye, will show that these stars are not equally scattered along the whole extent of their course, but are frequently collected in great masses or clusters, with comparatively empty spaces around or between them. These are especially marked in the portions of the belt visible in the south in the evenings of summer and autumn.

A remarkable fact connected with the universe is that