1912.] OF THE GLOBULAR CLUSTERS. 119 



verse, it becomes necessary for the modern investigator to consider 

 also the higher orders of sidereal systems, including those made up 

 of thousands and even millions of stars. It is only by such a com- 

 prehensive view of nature, which embraces and unites all types of 

 systems under one common principle, that we may hope to establish 

 the most general laws governing the evolution of the sidereal universe. 



Accordingly, although the strict mathematical treatment of the 

 great historical problem of 7J-bodies is but little advanced by the 

 recent researches of geometers, yet if we could arrive at the general 

 secular tendency in nature, from the observational study of the phe- 

 nomena presented by highly complex systems of stars, operating 

 under known laws of attractive and repulsive, forces, the former 

 for gathering the matter into large masses, the latter for redistribut- 

 ing it in the form of fine dust, the result of such an investigation 

 would guide us towards a grasp of problems too complex for rigor- 

 ous treatment by any known method of analysis. 



Now it happens that in the second volume of the " Researches 

 on the Evolution of the Stellar System," 1910, the writer was able to 

 establish great generality in the processes of cosmogony, and to show 

 that the universal tendency in nature is for the large bodies to drift 

 towards the most powerful centers of attraction, while the only 

 throwing off of masses that ever takes place is that of small particles 

 expelled from the stars under the action of repulsive forces and 

 driven away for the formation of new nebulae. The repulsive forces 

 thus operate to counteract the clustering tendency noticed by the 

 elder Herschel, and so clearly foreseen by Newton as an inevitable 

 effect of universal gravitation upon the motions of the solar system 

 that he believed the intervention of the Deity eventually would 

 become necessary for the restoration of the order of the world (cf. 

 Newton's "Letters to Bentley," Brewster's "Life of Xewton," Vol. 

 IL, and Chapter XVIL, and Appendix X). 



But wdiilst the argument developed in the second volume of my 

 "Researches" gives unexpected simplicity, uniformity and continuity 

 to the processes of cosmogony, there has not yet been developed, so 

 far as I know, any precise investigation of the attractive forces oper- 

 ating in globular clusters, which might disclose the nature nf the 



