Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/228

206 they were placed upon a star-map in their proper positions (1786), and, as the discoveries went on, the real laws of the distribution of the nebulæ and of the clusters over the surface of the sky showed themselves more and more plainly. It was by this means that was led to the announcement of the law that the spaces richest in nebulæ are distant from the Milky Way, etc. By no other means could he have detected this, and I believe this to have been the first example of the use of the graphical method, now become common in treating large masses of statistics.

It is still in his capacity of an observer—an acute and wise one—that is considered. But this was the least of his gifts. This vast mass of material was not left in this state: it served him for a stepping-stone to larger views of the nature and extent of the nebulous matter itself.

His views on the nature of nebulæ underwent successive changes. At first he supposed all nebulæ to be but aggregations of stars. The logic was simple. To the naked