326 THE WORLD MACHINE 



take place from a coarse cluster like the Pleiades down to a 

 milky nebulosity like that of Orion, every intermediate step 

 being represented." At first this led him to the idea that 

 eventually they might all be dissolved into stars. Later on, 

 as we shall find, he put aside this view, to regard them as floating 

 islands of starry mist. 



Herschel did not exhaust the possibilities of stellar research, 

 though so it must have seemed when he died. He lived to a 

 splendid age ; he left a son nobly to carry on his work. The 

 life with which his own may best be likened is Galileo's. He 

 did for the larger universe of the stars what the Tuscan had 

 done for the immediate portion in which we dwell. Theirs 

 undoubtedly was a wonderful opportunity. But it was open 

 to others. That is why in the records of this world the account 

 of genius the departure from the normal, essentially imitating, 

 uninnovating mind must always be large. 



Our debt to them is great. Consider how vast a revolution 

 had been wrought in the thoughts of mankind within the brief 

 span of the life and death of these two men and we shall hardly 

 begrudge their fame. It was a period of but little more than 

 two centuries. Within these two centuries the race had gained 

 a larger, more precise, more vivid idea of the realities of creation 

 than, let us say, in the two hundred centuries or more that 

 we may consider civilisation a relatively high civilisation, in 

 point of speech and manners and the conveniences and trappings 

 of life to have endured. 



Yet in a larger sense it was not their work. It was the 

 work of an instrument in rounder phrase, of a machine. With- 

 out the telescope, Galileo and Herschel yes, and Newton and 

 Laplace and all their kind were as babes on a deserted barque 

 drifting the ways of the sea. Think of what were our ideas 

 without it ; consider what an utter havoc it wrought in all 

 man's primitive impressions and ideas. When Galileo lifted 

 his first telescope to the sky, there was naught save the geo- 

 metrical constructions of a priest to disturb the repose of the 

 earth. Men trod upon a globe solid and unmoving, and beneath the 

 unhasting heavens. " Unchanging as the stars " was a synonym 

 of the time. When Herschel died, men lived upon a whirling 

 earth, shooting incredibly through space ; this earth but a 

 point turning round about one of fifty million suns. The optic 

 tube had confirmed wild conjecture, had reached far beyond 



