GASEOUS NATURE OF NEBULA 229 



own day, it has been proved true. The prism has 

 shown that these inconceivably vast masses of gas 

 exist. Justice to Herschel requires that his rights 

 to the first announcement of this new and startling 

 view of the gradual formation of worlds should not be 

 overlooked, as is sometimes done. 1 " The profound 

 awe," says the discoverer of the gaseous nature of some 

 nebulae, " which I felt on looking for the first time at 

 that which no eye of man had seen, and which even 

 the scientific imagination could not foreshow," is the 

 well expressed wonder of true science, when it pene- 

 trates into the workshops of the Almighty, but Her- 

 schel's imagination had done more in 1811 than 

 " foreshow " the discovery made fully by Sir William 

 Huggins in 1864. The imagination of William Herschel 

 penetrated into this secret house of wonders, and gave 

 expression to what was believed to be going on in 

 eternal ages and through infinite space. 



There are two magnificent nebulae to which astro- 

 nomers have specially turned their telescopes, the one in 

 Orion and the other in Andromeda. Writing in 1811, 

 after thirty-seven years' study of these wonderfully 

 mysterious clouds, Herschel thus speaks of " the great 

 nebula in the constellation of Orion discovered by 

 Huyghens. This highly interesting object engaged 



1 "Sir William Herschel supposed that they [nebulae] were all really 

 star-clusters, but so enormously remote that even the most powerful 

 telescopes could not render visible the stars composing them" 

 (Wallace, The Wonderful Century, p. 44). This is a singular statement 

 to come from the gifted author or co-author of the Darwinian theory. 

 The reduction of the immensely vast to the comparatively small was 

 Herschel's view of development or evolution in the realms of space ; the 

 growth of organic life from the simple cell to the living forms of earth 

 the inverse process is the idea or hypothesis of natural science 

 to-day. See Phil. Trans., 1791, pp. 73-83. 



