He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow.
He therefore issues the work to satisfy their desires, although, he states, it is manifest that it would have seen the light in a far more perfect state if his father could have put the finishing touches to it; and he mentions that, in the opinion of the best judges, his father possessed, among other most excellent gifts, in the highest degree the power of explaining the most difficult matters by a certain and easy method in the fewest possible words.
Imagine this stratum to be uniformly filled with stars (of course in the actual universe instead of sharply defined boundaries AB and CD, we shall have a gradual thinning out of the stars) it follows that in the two directions SP and SP' the fewest stars will be seen; these then are the directions of the galactic poles.
The older one - which may be called the " one-drift " hypothesis, since according to it the stars appear to form a single drift moving away from the solar apex - requires that the apparent directions of motion should be so distributed that fewest stars are moving directly towards the solar apex, and most stars along the great circle away from the solar apex, the number decreasing symmetrically, for directions inclined on either side of this great circle, according to a law which can be calculated.
No comment is made by the narrator; he tells his tale in the fewest words and passes on.
