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 impossible 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
- ↑ Sir David Brewster in his edition of Ferguson's Astronomy (1823), ii. 298. He is referring specially to nebulæ, of which Herschel "observed the position, magnitude, and structure of no fewer than 2500."
- ↑ Lalande, i. 152; Pliny, ii. 26.
