after a long awful silence, exclaim, 'Hier ist wahrhaftig ein Loch in Himmel!'[1] and, as I said before, stopping afterwards at the same spot, but leaving it unsatisfied." The nephew attended to her wishes, rummaged Scorpio with the telescope, and found many blank spaces "without the smallest star. . . . Then come on the globular clusters, then more blank fields, then suddenly the Milky Way comes on in large milky nebulous irregular patches and banks."
Other Milky Ways than the star-island, to which we belong, "which cannot well be less but are probably much larger," Herschel at one time believed he saw in the white clouds, which float in the depths of space, unseen by the naked eye. Sometimes his telescope resolved them into brilliant star-dust, scattered like shining jewels on the dark background of the heavens: and sometimes not. That they are at immense, at inconceivable distances from the solar system and from each other, is evident. How far, it would be rash to say. But Herschel's enthusiasm overleaped all boundaries of prudent reticence. Some of them may be "600 times the distance of Sirius from us"; other clusters "cannot well be supposed to be at less than six or eight thousand times that distance." Light, the swiftest messenger we know, light, which can journey round the earth eight times in a second, would take six thousand years to bring us a message from the nearest of these clusters, or more than eighty thousand years from the more remote. If his views prove correct, a messenger of wing so swift, and of foot so tireless, may well be regarded as an angel of the Almighty.
- ↑ "Here indeed is a hole in the Heavens!"
