Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/234

212 effect of condensation and of clustering power through all its course, even to the final breaking up of the Milky Way itself.

The memoirs of 1817 and 1818 add little to the general view of the physical constitution of the heavens. They are attempts to gain a scale of celestial measures by which we may judge of the distances of the stars and clusters in which these changes are going on.

There is little to change in statement of the general construction of the heavens. It is the groundwork upon which we have still to build. Every astronomical discovery and every physical fact well observed is material for the elaboration of its details or for the correction of some of its minor points. As a scientific conception it is perhaps the grandest that has ever entered into the human mind. As a study of the height to which the efforts of one man may go, it is almost without a parallel. The philosopher who will add to it to-day, will have his facts and his methods ready to his hands. presents the almost unique example of an eager observer marshaling the multitude of single