own day, it has been proved true. The prism has shown that these inconceivably vast masses of gas exist. Justice to Herschel requires that his rights to the first announcement of this new and startling view of the gradual formation of worlds should not be overlooked, as is sometimes done.[1] "The profound awe," says the discoverer of the gaseous nature of some nebulæ, "which I felt on looking for the first time at that which no eye of man had seen, and which even the scientific imagination could not foreshow," is the well expressed wonder of true science, when it penetrates into the workshops of the Almighty, but Herschel's imagination had done more in 1811 than "foreshow" the discovery made fully by Sir William Huggins in 1864. The imagination of William Herschel penetrated into this secret house of wonders, and gave expression to what was believed to be going on in eternal ages and through infinite space.
There are two magnificent nebulæ to which astronomers have specially turned their telescopes, the one in Orion and the other in Andromeda. Writing in 1811, after thirty-seven years' study of these wonderfully mysterious clouds, Herschel thus speaks of "the great nebula in the constellation of Orion discovered by Huyghens. This highly interesting object engaged
- ↑ "Sir William Herschel supposed that they [nebulæ] were all really star-clusters, but so enormously remote that even the most powerful telescopes could not render visible the stars composing them" (Wallace, The Wonderful Century, p. 44). This is a singular statement to come from the gifted author or co-author of the Darwinian theory. The reduction of the immensely vast to the comparatively small was Herschel's view of development or evolution in the realms of space; the growth of organic life from the simple cell to the living forms of earth—the inverse process—is the idea or hypothesis of natural science to-day. See Phil. Trans. 1791, pp. 73-83.
