"A way there is in heaven's extended plain Which when the skies are clear is seen below And mortals, by the name of Milky, know; The groundwork is of stars, through which the road Lies open to great Jupiter's abode."[470] From an examination of the distribution of the faint stars composing the Milky Way, and those shown in Argelander's charts of stars down to the 9½ magnitude, Easton finds that there is "a real connection between the distribution of 9th and 10th magnitude stars, and that of the faint stars of the Milky Way, and that consequently the faint or very faint stars of the galactic zone are at a distance which does not greatly exceed that of the 9th and 10th magnitude stars."[471] A similar conclusion was, I think, arrived at by Proctor many years ago. Now let us consider the meaning of this result. Taking stars of the 15th magnitude, if their faintness were merely due to greater distance, their actual brightness--if of the same size--would imply that they are at 10 times the distance of stars of the 10th magnitude. But if at the same distance from us, a 10th magnitude star would be 100 times brighter than a 15th magnitude star, and if of the same density and "intrinsic brightness" (or luminosity of surface) the 10th magnitude would have 10 times the diameter of the fainter star, and hence its volume would be 1000 times greater (10{3}), and this great difference is not perhaps improbable. The constitution of the Milky Way is not the same in all its parts. The bright spot between β and γ Cygni is due to relatively bright stars. Others equally dense but fainter regions in Auriga and Monoceros are only evident in stars of the 8th and 9th magnitude, and the light of the well-known luminous spot in "Sobieski's Shield," closely south of λ Aquilæ, is due to stars below magnitude 9½. The correspondence in distribution between the stars of Argelander's charts and the fainter stars of the Milky Way shows, as Easton points out, that Herschel's hypothesis of a uniform distribution of stars of approximately equal size is quite untenable.