FIXED STAR A MISNOMER 129 



nature and ascertain the hidden processes of an 

 Almighty Worker, they would have been invaluable 

 as a serviceable hypothesis for future efforts. Boldly 

 and with all reverence, he set himself to open the 

 closed hand of Almighty Wisdom, and find what that 

 Power had kept hid. Others laboured in this cause 

 before him, but " we are indebted solely to the genius 

 and industry of Dr. Herschel for perfecting their 

 sagacious views, and supporting them by a body of 

 evidence amounting nearly to demonstration." 1 



The first point he laid down was that there is 

 ample reason "strongly to suspect that there is not, 

 in strictness of speaking, one fixed star in the 

 heavens." Fixed stars is a name we have been led 

 to use, because, unlike the planets or wanderers, 

 they seem never to change their places in the sky ; 

 but absolute rest in any one of these stars is im- 

 possible except, it may be, as a result of nicely 

 balanced forces. Herschel was beginning in 1783 A.D. 

 at the same starting-point as the famous Hipparchus 

 nearly two thousand years before, who " observed a 

 new star which appeared in his own day, and which 

 led him to believe that the same thing might happen 

 frequently, and that the stars considered fixed might 

 be in motion." 2 The proper motion, as it is called, of 

 some of the brightest stars was suspected nearly a 

 century before Herschel's time and was afterwards 

 fully proved. What the nature of that motion may 

 be, might be guessed by astronomers, but was really 



1 Sir David Brewster in his edition of Ferguson's Astronomy (1823), 

 ii. 298. He is referring specially to nebulae, of which Herschel ' ' observed 

 the position, magnitude, and structure of no fewer than 2500," 



2 Lalande, i. 152 ; Pliny, ii. 26. 



9 



