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Updated: May 7, 2025
But here his speculations have attracted a great deal of attention, and, with modifications, are accepted, at least as a working hypothesis, by a fair number of people. When Sir John Herschel had extended his father's researches into the Southern Hemisphere he was also led to the belief that some nebulae were a phosphorescent material spread through space like fog or mist.
"The sea of all space the sea of vastness that lies between the far-flung nebulae the mighty void alone on a sea, the vastness of which no man can imagine alone alone where no other man has been; alone, so far from all matter, from all mankind, that not even light, racing at billions of miles each day, could reach home in less than a million years."
All this, clearly, is but an amplification of that nebular hypothesis which, long before the spectroscope gave us warrant to accurately judge our sidereal neighbors, had boldly imagined the development of stars out of nebulae and of planets out of stars. But Lockyer's hypothesis does not stop with this.
But the heavenly spaces contain nebulae as well as stars; and photography can now be even more successful in picturing them than the stars. A few years ago the late lamented Keeler, at the Lick Observatory, undertook to see what could be done by pointing the Crossley reflecting telescope at the sky and putting a sensitive photographic plate in the focus.
All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so long as the surrounding countries France, Germany, and Spain remained mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable.
This point settled, let it now be remarked, that Herschel's resources enabled him to unmask many of these nebulae: stars they were, and stars he forced them to own themselves. Why should any decent world wear an alias? There was nothing, you know, to be ashamed of in being an honest cluster of stars.
And when we consider that all other visible stars and nebulae are cooling and contracting bodies, like our sun, to what other conclusion could we very well come?
On my last sheet I send some nuts for you to pick, some wholly, some half, others not at all, cracked. Schimper is lost in the great impenetrable world of suns, with their planets, moons, and comets; he soars even into the region of the double stars, the milky way, and the nebulae. On a loose sheet come the "nuts to pick."
On the day after this occurrence, the 28th of October, I was, at five in the morning, on the terrace of our house, making preparations for the observation of the eclipse. The weather was fine and serene. The crescent of Venus, and the constellation of the Ship, so splendid from the disposition of its immense nebulae, were lost in the rays of the rising sun.
Those who heard him read his Thesis at the Medical Commencement will not soon forget the impression made by his fine personal appearance and manners, nor the universal interest excited in the audience, as he read, with his beautiful enunciation, that striking paper entitled "Unresolved Nebulae in Vital Science."
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