Proctor’s discovery of the excess of bright stars on the Galaxy was confirmed by _Jean Charles Houzeau_ (1820-1888), director of the Brussels Observatory. Some time later J. E. Gore carefully examined the positions of all the brighter stars in the northern and southern hemisphere. Following this, he made an enumeration of the stars in the atlas of Heis and in the charts constructed by Harding; the outcome of the investigation being to show that stars of each individual magnitude taken separately tend to aggregate on the Galaxy, the aggregation being noticed even in first-magnitude stars. Gore further pointed out many cases of close connection between the lucid stars and the galactic light. A similar investigation was undertaken by Schiaparelli in 1889. Schiaparelli, basing his work on the catalogue of Gould and the photometric measures of Pickering, constructed a series of planispheres which demonstrated the crowding of the lucid stars towards the plane of the Galaxy. These investigations were still further continued by Simon Newcomb, who demonstrated that “the darker regions of the Galaxy are only slightly richer in stars visible to the naked eye than other parts of the heavens, while the bright areas are between 60 and 100 per cent richer than the dark areas.” The Dutch astronomer, _Charles Easton_, finds a connection between the distribution of ninth-magnitude stars and the luminous and obscure spots in the Galaxy. It was noticed by Gould, from observations made at Cordova, that “a belt or stream of bright stars appears to girdle the heavens very nearly in a great circle which intersects the Milky Way.” According to Gould, the belt includes Orion, Canis Major, Argo, Crux, Centaurus, Lupus, and Scorpio in the southern hemisphere, and Taurus, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus, and Lyra in the northern. This was interpreted by Celoria as indicating the existence of two galactic rings, but Gould considered the zone of bright stars to form with the Sun a subordinate cluster of about five hundred stars within the Galaxy.