228 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



'Hi.- work of observing, measuring, and recording tli. s< 

 Is of wonder, and sometimes <>! surpn mty 



when seen in the magic mirror of a reflector, was 

 : but this inl< -f.it i;;;ible work* T \\ ith his likr- 

 helper, seemed never to weary in his 

 efforts to lift the curtain that hil Creation's 

 glories from man. What these glories seemed (to him ) 

 t<> mean was unfolded in 1811 in a memoir which 

 anticipated by many years the doctrine of evolution 

 taught by Darwin, and which showed the progress, 

 slow it might be, " for, in this case, millions of \ 

 are perhaps but moments," but sure, of a vast body 

 of gas condensing into a sun or suns with a train of 

 planets around. 1 



When Herschel entered upon this inquiry he belk-v.-.l 

 that these nebulae, or whitish clouds or milky ways are 

 clusters of stars, too far off to be resolved into separate 

 points of light, but blended so together as to assume 

 the appearance of a little cloud in the depths of space. 

 "Longer experience and a better acquaintance" with 

 them induced him to change his mind. Vast masses 

 of gas, in which a few stars were sometimes seen, or 

 through which they shone from a greater <lisi 



believed by him to exist in space, besi-; 

 which an increase of telescopic power could resolve, 

 as the phrase was, into stars. 2 It was the idea of a 

 far-seeing mind, feeling its way to truth, and, in our 



1 "The reason for not having a more circumstantial account of such 

 a number of objects, is that they crowded upon me at the time of 

 sweeping in such quick succession that of sixty-one I < ouM but just 

 secure the place in the heavens, and of the remaining three hundred 

 and sixty-three, I had only time to add the relative size" (1'hiL 

 Trans, for 1811, p. 290). 



1. Trans, for 1811, p. '270. 



