Yet this field is necessarily confined to the surface of
our planet. In the field of stellar statistics millions of stars
are classified as if each taken individually were of no more
weight in the scale than a single inhabitant of China in the scale
of the sociologist. And yet the most insignificant of these suns
may, for aught we know, have planets revolving around it, the
interests of whose inhabitants cover as wide a range as ours do
upon our own globe.
The statistics of the stars may be said to have commenced with
Herschel's gauges of the heavens, which were continued from time
to time by various observers, never, however, on the largest
scale. The subject was first opened out into an illimitable field
of research through a paper presented by Kapteyn to the Amsterdam
Academy of Sciences in 1893. The capital results of this paper
were that different regions of space contain different kinds of
stars and, more especially, that the stars of the Milky Way
belong, in part at least, to a different class from those existing
elsewhere. Stars not belonging to the Milky Way are, in large
part, of a distinctly different class.
The outcome of Kapteyn's conclusions is that we are able to
describe the universe as a single object, with some characters of
an organized whole.
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