Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/191

Rh make it shine like a star of the sixth magnitude.

On the scheme here laid down, subsequently assigned the order of distance of various objects, mostly star-clusters, and his estimates of these distances are still quoted. They rest on the fundamental hypothesis which has been explained, and the error in the assumption of equal intrinsic brilliancy for all stars affects these estimates. It is perhaps probable that the hypothesis of equal brilliancy for all stars is still more erroneous than the hypothesis of equal distribution, and it may well be that there is a very large range indeed in the actual dimensions and in the intrinsic brilliancy of stars at the same order of distance from us, so that the tenth-magnitude stars, for example, may be scattered throughout the spheres which would assign to the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth magnitudes. However this may be, the fact remains that it is from groundwork that future investigators must build. He found the whole 8