AND THEORY OF THE HEAVENS. - 63 



were openings in the firmament through which he believed 

 he saw the Empyrean. 1 A philosopher of more enlightened 

 views, M. de Maupertuis, already referred to, in view of 

 their figure and perceptible diameter, holds them to be 

 heavenly bodies of astonishing magnitude which, on 

 account of their great flattening, caused by the rotatory 

 impulse, present elliptical forms when seen obliquely. 



Any one will be easily convinced that this latter explan- 

 ation is likewise untenable. As these nebulous stars must 

 undoubtedly be removed at least as far from us as the 

 other fixed stars, it is not only their magnitude which 

 would be so astonishing seeing that it would necessarily 

 exceed that of the largest stars many thousand times 

 but it would be strangest of all that, being self-luminous 

 bodies and suns, they should still with this extraordinary 

 magnitude show the dullest and feeblest light. 



It is far more natural and conceivable to regard them 

 as being not such enormous single stars but systems of 

 many stars, whose distance presents them in such a 

 narrow space that the light which is individually im- 

 perceptible from each of them, reaches us, on account of 

 their immense multitude, in a uniform pale glimmer. 

 Their analogy with the stellar system in which we 

 find ourselves, their shape, which is just what it ought 

 to be according to our theory, the feebleness of their 

 light which demands a presupposed infinite distance : all 

 this is in perfect harmony with the view that these 

 elliptical figures are just universes and, so to speak, 

 Milky Ways, like those whose constitution we have just 

 unfolded. And if conjectures, with which analogy and 



1 [Astro- Theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes 

 of God from a Survey of the Heavens , by W. Derham. London, 1714.] 



