little earth is on the same scale and partakes of the same procedure as this profusion in creating worlds. Unity of design to the remotest bounds of nature is a conclusion that plainly results from Herschel's discoveries.
The worst objection taken to the writings of this midnight watcher was the strange English he sometimes used. "Stupendous as Mr. Herschel's investigations are," Horace Walpole wrote to a friend, "and admirable as are his talents, his expression of 'our retired corner of the universe' seems a little improper. When a little emmet, standing on its anthill, could get a peep into infinity, how could he think he saw a retired corner in it? . . . If there are twenty millions of worlds, why not as many, and as many, and as many more? Oh, one's imagination cracks!"[1] "To the inhabitants of the nebulæ of the present catalogue," Herschel wrote, "our sidereal system must appear either as a small nebulous patch; an extended streak of milky light; a large resolvable nebula; a very compressed cluster of minute stars hardly discernible; or as an immense collection of large scattered stars of various sizes." Well may we repeat in sobriety and humility what the poet, in contempt and fun, uttered about the same time,
"Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oorsels as ithers see us."
The last two papers which Herschel wrote on The Construction of the Heavens were given to the world about four years before his death. They show the same grasp of details, the same enthusiasm in working, out
- ↑ Letters, vi. 461, 258.
