The celebrated Spanish botanist Cavanilles was the first
who entertained the idea of "seeing grass grow," and he directed the
horizontal micrometer threads of a powerfully magnifying glass at one time to
p 150
the apex of the shoot of a bambusa, and at another on the rapidly-growing
stem of an American aloe ('Agave Americana', precisely as the astronomer
places his cross of net-work against a culminating star. In the collective
life of physical nature, in the organic as in the sidereal world, all things
that have been, that are, and will be, are alike dependent on motion.
The breaking up of the Milky Way, of which I have just spoken, requires
special notice. William Herschel, our safe and admirable guide to this
portion of the regions of space, has discovered by his star-guagings that
the telescopic breadth of the Milky Way extends from six to seven degrees
beyond what is indicated by our astronomical maps and by the extent of the
sidereal radiance visible to the naked eye.*
[footnote] *Sir William Herschel, in the 'Philos. Transact.' for 1817, Part
ii p. 438.
The two brilliant nodes in which the branches of the zone unite, in the
region of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and in the vicinity of Scorpio and
Sagittarius, appear to exercise a powerful attraction on the contiguous
stars; in the most brilliant part, however between beta and [Greek symbol]
Cygni, one half of the 330,000 stars that have been discovered in a breadth
of 5 degrees are directed toward one side, and the remainder to the other.
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