Construction of the Heavens, Herschel, with wider views, a better instrument, and a clearer insight into what he considered "the Laboratories of the universe, wherein the most salutary remedies for the decay of the whole are prepared," essayed a bolder flight into a world of "things, unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Stars, clusters of stars, and nebulæ were the building stones, so to speak, out of which Almighty Wisdom constructed the starry sphere around our earth. How many of them exist, what are their relations to each other, and how are they arranged in space? were some of the questions to which he sought an answer. When he began the work of observation, he "surmised that several nebulæ might yet remain undiscovered for want of sufficient light to detect them. . . . The event has plainly proved that my expectations were well founded; for I have already found 466 new nebulæ and clusters of stars, none of which, to my present knowledge, have been seen before by any person." Great though the discovery was, it was only the beginning of others still greater. These nebulæ or little white clouds were similar to the Milky Way in the colour of their light, but apparently of immensely less extent. The first known of them, properly so called, was that of Andromeda, to which the attention of astronomers was directed by Simon Marius in 1612. Others were seen and recorded during the next century and a half, but the Magellanic clouds were visible to the naked eye and formed a striking spectacle in the southern heavens. The Dutch, who saw them in their voyages to India round South Africa, called them the Clouds of the Cape. Astronomers were
