282 Proceedings of the British Association for 1850. 



tern to the frontier of the sidereal universe around us, we 

 traverse a gulf of inconceivable extent. If we represent the 

 radius of the solar system, or of Neptune's orbit (which is 

 2900 millions of miles) by a line two miles long, the interval 

 between our system, or the orbit of Neptune, and the nearest 

 fixed star will be greater than the whole circumference of our 

 globe — or equal to a length of 27,600 miles. The parallax 

 of the nearest fixed star being supposed to be one second, its 

 distance from the Sun will be nearly 412,370 times the radius 

 of the Earth's orbit, or 13,746 times that of Neptune, which 

 is 30 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. And yet to 

 that distant.zone has the genius of man traced the Creator's 

 arm working the wonders of his power, and diffusing the 

 gifts of his love — ^the heat and the light of suns — the neces- 

 sary elements of physical and intellectual life. It is by 

 means of the gigantic telescope of Lord Rosse that we have 

 become acquainted with the form and character of those 

 great assemblages of stars which compose the sidereal uni- 

 verse. Drawings and descriptions of the more remarkable 

 of these nebulse, as resolved by this noble instrument, were 

 communicated by Dr Robinson to the last meeting of the 

 Association, and it is with peculiar satisfaction that I am 

 able to state that many important discoveries have been 

 made by Lord Rosse and his assistant, Mr Stoney, during 

 the last year. In many of the nebulse the peculiarities of 

 structure are very remarkable, and, as Lord Rosse observes, 

 " seem even to indicate the presence of dynamical laws almost 

 within our grasp." The spiral arrangement so strongly de- 

 veloped in some of the nebulae is traceable more or less dis- 

 tinctly in many ; but " more frequently,'' to use Lord Rosse's 

 own words, " there is a nearer approach to a kind of irre- 

 gular, interrupted, annular disposition of the luminous ma- 

 terial, than to the regularity observed in others ;" but his 

 lordship is of opinion that those nebulae are systems of a 

 very similar nature, seen more or less perfectly, and vari- 

 ously placed with reference to the line of sight. In re- 

 examining the more remarkable of these objects. Lord Rosse 

 intends to view them with the full light of his six feet specu- 

 lum, undiminished by the second reflection of the small 

 mirror. By thus adopting what is called the front vierc, he 



