22 THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



seems almost wholly overlooked. Again and again, in 

 books of astronomy and in scientific papers. Dr. Huggins's 

 discovery that many of the nebulae are vast agglomera- 

 tions of glowing gas, is spoken of as strikingly opposed 

 to the views of Sir W. Herschel. The circumstance is, 

 indeed, of a piece with the fact to which we have already 

 referred that ideas respecting the Milky Way, which 

 Herschel was the first to reject, are still presented as 

 confidently as though they were the fruits of his 

 matured experience.* 



What was really overthrown by Dr. Huggins's dis- 

 covery, was the opinion, which had been gradually 

 gaining ground, that Sir W. Herschel had been mis- 

 taken. For instance, Professor Grant, in one of the 

 finest works on astronomy which the last quarter of a 

 century has produced, wrote thus : c Notwithstanding 

 the ingenuity of illustration and the incontestable force 

 of reasoning by which Sir W. Herschel sought to 

 establish his bold hypothesis, it has not received that 

 confirmation from the labours of subsequent inquirers 

 which is so remarkable in the case of many of the other 

 speculations of that great astronomer. In fact, the 

 greater the optical power of the telescope with which 

 the heavens are surveyed, the more strongly do the 

 results tend to produce the impression that all nebulas 

 are in reality vast aggregations of stars, which assume 

 a nebulous aspect only because the telescope with which 



* Well may Struve ask, ' Ne serait-il pas temps que 1'Angleterre se 

 decide a honorer la m^moire de son plus grand astronome, par une 

 Edition complete et systematise de ses ceuvres ? ' 



