Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 2 | Page 9

How does all this concern Lord Rosse's telescope on the one side,
or general astronomy on the other? This nebula, he will say, seems a
bad kind of fellow by your account; and of course it will not break my
heart to hear, that he has had the conceit taken out of him. But in what
way can that affect the pretensions of this new instrument; or, if it did,
how can the character of the instrument affect the general condition of
a science? Besides, is not the science a growth from very ancient times?
With great respect for the Earl of Rosse, is it conceivable that he, or
any man, by one hour's working the tackle of his new instrument, can
have carried any stunning revolutionary effect into the heart of a
section so ancient in our mathematical physics? But the reader is to
consider, that the ruins made by Lord Rosse, are in sidereal astronomy,
which is almost wholly a growth of modern times; and the particular
part of it demolished by the new telescope, is almost exclusively the
creation of the two Herschels, father and son. Laplace, it is true,
adopted their views; and he transferred them to the particular service of
our own planetary system. But he gave to them no new sanction, except
what arises from showing that they would account for the appearances,
as they present themselves to our experience at this day. That was a
negative confirmation; by which I mean, that, had their views failed in

the hands of Laplace, then they were proved to be false; but, not failing,
they were not therefore proved to be true. It was like proving a gun; if
the charge is insufficient, or if, in trying the strength of cast iron, timber,
ropes, &c., the strain is not up to the rigor of the demand, you go away
with perhaps a favorable impression as to the promises of the article; it
has stood a moderate trial; it has stood all the trial that offered, which is
always something; but you are still obliged to feel that, when the
ultimate test is applied, smash may go the whole concern. Lord Rosse
applied an ultimate test; and smash went the whole concern. Really I
must have laughed, though all the world had been angry, when the
shrieks and yells of expiring systems began to reverberate all the way
from the belt of Orion; and positively at the very first broadside
delivered from this huge four- decker of a telescope.
But what was it then that went to wreck? That is a thing more easy to
ask than to answer. At least, for my own part, I complain that some
vagueness hangs over all the accounts of the nebular hypothesis.
However, in this place a brief sketch will suffice.
Herschel the elder, having greatly improved the telescope, began to
observe with special attention a class of remarkable phenomena in the
starry world hitherto unstudied, viz.: milky spots in various stages of
diffusion. The nature of these appearances soon cleared itself up thus
far, that generally they were found to be starry worlds, separated from
ours by inconceivable distances, and in that way concealing at first
their real nature. The whitish gleam was the mask conferred by the
enormity of their remotion. This being so, it might have been supposed
that, as was the faintness of these cloudy spots or _nebulæ_, such was
the distance. But that did not follow: for in the treasury of nature it
turned out that there were other resources for modifying the powers of
distance, for muffling and unmuffling the voice of stars. Suppose a
world at the distance x, which distance is so great as to make the
manifestation of that world weak, milky, nebular. Now let the secret
power that wields these awful orbs, push this world back to a double
distance! that should naturally make it paler and more dilute than ever:
and yet by compression, by deeper centralization, this effect shall be
defeated; by forcing into far closer neighborhood the stars which
compose this world, again it shall gleam out brighter when at 2x than
when at x. At this point of compression, let the great moulding power a

second time push it back; and a second time it will grow faint. But once
more let this world be tortured into closer compression, again let the
screw be put upon it, and once again it shall shake off the oppression of
distance as the dew-drops are shaken from a lion's mane. And thus in
fact the mysterious architect plays at hide-and-seek with his worlds. 'I
will hide it,' he says, 'and it shall be found again by man; I will
withdraw it into distances that shall seem fabulous, and again it shall