atmosphere—would be sufficient to melt a shell of ice 120 feet thick covering the whole earth; according to Dr. Langley, the thickness would be about 160 feet. [1]
308. With his return to England in 1838 Herschel's career as an observer came to an end; but the working out of the results of his Cape observations, the arrangement and cataloguing of his own and his father's discoveries, provided occupation for many years. A magnificent volume on the Results of Astronomical Observations made during the years 1834–8 at the Cape of Good Hope appeared in 1847; and a catalogue of all known nebulae and clusters, amounting to 5,079, was presented to the Royal Society in 1864, while a corresponding catalogue of more than 10,000 double and multiple stars was never finished, though the materials collected for it were published posthumously in 1879. John Herschel's great catalogue of nebulae has since been revised and enlarged by Dr. Dreyer, the result being a list of 7,840 nebulae and clusters known up to the end of 1887; and a supplementary list of discoveries made in 1888–94 published by the same writer contains 1,529 entries, so that the total number now known is between 9,000 and 10,000, of which more than half have been discovered by the two Herschels.
309. Double stars have been discovered and studied by a number of astronomers besides the Herschels. One of the most indefatigable workers at this subject was the elder Struve (§ 279), who was successively director of the two Russian observatories of Dorpat and Pulkowa. He observed altogether some 2,640 double and multiple stars, measuring in each case with care the length and direction of the line joining the two components, and noting other peculiarities, such as contrasts in colour between the members of a pair. He paid attention only to double stars the two components of which were not more than 32" apart, thus rejecting a good many which William Herschel would have noticed; as the number of known doubles rapidly increased, it was clearly necessary to concentrate attention on those which might with some reasonable degree of
- ↑ Observations made on Mont Blanc under the direction of M. Janssen in 1897 indicate a slightly larger number than Dr. Langley's.
