NEBULA. 



329 



tifies the freshness and depth of the impressions produced on 

 his mind, but how great is the distance from this first sketch 

 made in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the 

 somewhat less imperfect descriptions of Picard, Le Gentil, 

 and Messier, to the admirable delineations of Sir John Herschei 

 (1837), and of William Cranch Bond (1848), the Director ok 

 the Observatory at Cambridge, U.S. !* 



The former of these two astronomers had the great advan 

 tage" of observing the nebula in Orion, since 1834, at the 

 Cape of Good Hope, at an altitude of 60, and with a tweuty- 



behind. The same thing I have since beheld over and over 

 again, without any change in its appearance and in the same 

 position, so that one might almost believe that this mar- 

 vellous object, whatever it is, is permanently fixed there ; 

 it is certain I have nowhere else noticed anything similar to 

 this in the other fixed stars. For those which- have general! v 

 been considered as nebulaa, and even the Milky Way itself, 

 when seen through a telescope, are found to have nothing 

 nebulous about them, but are nothing more than a multi- 

 tude of several stars clustered together." Huygens himself 

 estimated the powers he employed in his twenty-five feet 

 refractor as equal to a hundred diameters (p. 538). Are 

 the ' quatuor stellae trans nebulam lucentes " the stars of 

 the trapezium ? The small and very rough sketch (Tab. xlvii. 

 fig. 4, Phenomenon in Orione Novum.) represents only a 

 group of three stars, near an indentation which one might 

 certainly regard as the Sinus Magnus. Perhaps the drawing 

 gives only the three stars in the trapezium, which range from 

 the fourth to the seventh magnitude. Dominique Cassiui 

 moreover boasts that he was the first who observed the fourth 

 st;ir. 



64 William Cranch Bond, in the Transactions of the Ame- 

 rican Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series, vol. iii. 

 pp 87-96. 



63 Observations at the Cape, 54-69, pi. viii. ; Outlines, 

 337 and 88-3, pi iv. % I 



