Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/199

Rh not be immediately answered in the state of the science at that time. In his efforts to find a method for determining the dimensions of the stellar universe, he was finally led, as has been shown, to regard the brightness of a star as, in general, the best attainable measure of its distance from us. His work, however, was done with telescopes of various dimensions and powers, and it was therefore necessary to find some law for comparing the different results among themselves as well as with those given by observations with an unassisted eye. This necessity prompted an investigation, published in 1800, in which, after drawing the distinction between absolute and intrinsic brightness, gave an expression for the space-penetrating power of a telescope. The reasoning at the base of this conception was as follows.

The ratio of the light entering the eye when directed toward a star, to the whole light given out by the star, would be as the area of the pupil of the eye to the area of the whole sphere having the star as a centre and our distance from the star as a radius. 8*