TELESCOPIC TESTS NEBULA. 



Herscliel observed the same object, and discovered in. it a very 

 remarkable feature, which the telescope of his father had failed 

 to disclose. This object, as drawn by Sir John Herschel, is shown 

 in fig. 15. The separation in what Sir William Herschel called a 



Fig. 14. 



halo or glory, and what Sir John Herschel calls a ring, was 

 the remarkable character which Sir John discovered. Sir John 

 conjectured, from the general appearance of the object, 

 that the central round nebula is a globular mass of stars, too 

 distant to admit of being resolved by his telescope, and that 

 what his father called a glory, is an annular mass of stars 

 surrounding the former and split in the direction of its plane, 

 so as to produce the appearance shown in the upper part of the 

 figure. 



Sir John conjectured that such stellar masses might have some 

 analogy to the mass of stars which forms the milky way, and of 

 which our sun is an individual unit. 



20. How completely these speculations, ingenious as they were, 

 were scattered to the winds, by bringing to bear on the same 

 object a higher telescopic power, will be apparent by inspecting 



59 



