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1844 and 1845, the Earl of Rosse brought his “three-feet 
mirror ” to bear upon it, but couldnot seethe vestige of a star. 
“ The Nebular Hypothesis ” was strong then. The immense 
weight of Hutton’s influence, combined with that of Herschel 
and Laplace, bore on the scientific mind,andmade the conviction 
apparently as irresistible as the nebula was irresolvable. Men 
felt as if they must believe that here was the primary state 
of a world— a cloud of luminous matter circling round a cen- 
tre, and in process of cooling down into a solid globe like 
our own* But Lord Rosse at length constructed Ins telescope 
with a six-feet speculum. Professor Nichol tells us the result 
in language of intense eloquence. He was present the hist 
time the “mighty tube” was directed to the mysterious 
nebula in Orion. The instrument was still imperfect, and no 
stars were seen. At length, however. Lord Rosse wrote, 
under date March 19th, 1846, telling him that with only 
half the magnifying power the speculum bore, he could 
plainly see that all about the trapezium is a mass of stars ; 
the rest of the nebula also abounding with stars, and exhi- 
biting the characteristics of resolvability strongly marked. 
“And thus,” says Dr. Nichol, “ doubt and speculation on this 
great subject vanished for ever!” Then he says, es - 
the Infinite we had built up after the fashion of what had 
become familiar, was yet, with all its greatness, only Idola, 
and could fill neither Space nor Time, t It required, as we 
have seen, a few years longer to demonstrate the mythical 
character of the “ fundamental granite of a cooling globe ; 
but now these “ brilliant ” notions are safely registered in the 
record of dreams. It should never be forgotten that the most 
confident unbelief in the Sacred Scriptures perhaps ever en- 
tertained, had its foundations in these purely imaginary notions 
of great minds. So had the most laboriously framed but 
misleading interpretations of the Mosaic narrative the force 
of their imagined necessity m those now abandoned theories 
It is not, however, in what may be regarded as isolated 
hypotheses that we notice the most signal failures in specu- 
lative geology. In its grandest generalizations there are 
astonishing defects. For example when we are told that the 
crust of the earth is known to the depth of peihaps te 
miles”! and inquire into the grounds of the statement, we are 
introduced into a field of astonishing reasoning. The deepest 
* It is a mizzlin'-' question wliy philosophers did not regard these nebulas 
as worlds gottlmoke, rather than consolidating into globes like our own. 
t Nichol’ s System of the World, ed. 1816, pp. 53 to 53. 
; Lyell’s Elements of Geology, page 2. 
