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These, unlike the others, are found outside as well as inside the Milky Way, although they are more numerous inside its boundaries than elsewhere. The term star-cluster is sometimes applied, though improperly, to assemblages which are rather groups, such, for instance, as the Pleiades. In their most characteristic aspect star-clusters are of a globular shape globes of suns!

We could not have made a better beginning, for here within a space of a few square degrees we have a wonderful variety of double stars and multiple stars, so close and delicate as to test the powers of the best telescopes, besides a profusion of star-clusters and nebulæ, including one of the supreme marvels of space, the Great Nebula in the Sword.

Among the more remarkable of these are the well-known nebula in Andromeda, and the great spiral in Canes Venatici; and, as a general rule, the emissions of all such nebulæ as present the appearance of star-clusters grown misty through excessive distance are of the same kind. It would, however, be eminently rash to conclude thence that they are really aggregations of sun-like bodies.

In 1802 he laid before the Royal Society a list of five thousand new stars, star-clusters, or other heavenly bodies which he had discovered, and which formed the great body of his personal additions to astronomical knowledge. The University of Oxford made him Doctor of Laws, and very late in life he was knighted by the king a too tardy acknowledgment of his immense services to science.