largest telescopes into clusters of stars. He believed
that the farthest of these nebulae that he could see
was at least three hundred thousand times as distant
from us as the nearest fixed star. Yet that nearest
star--so more recent studies prove--is so remote that
its light, travelling one hundred and eighty thousand
miles a second, requires three and one-half years to
reach our planet.

As if to give the finishing touches to this novel
scheme of cosmology, Herschel, though in the main
very little given to unsustained theorizing, allows himself
the privilege of one belief that he cannot call upon
his telescope to substantiate. He thinks that all the
myriad suns of his numberless systems are instinct with
life in the human sense. Giordano Bruno and a long
line of his followers had held that some of our sister
planets may be inhabited, but Herschel extends the
thought to include the moon, the sun, the stars--all the
heavenly bodies. He believes that he can demonstrate
the habitability of our own sun, and, reasoning from
analogy, he is firmly convinced that all the suns of all
the systems are "well supplied with inhabitants." In
this, as in some other inferences, Herschel is misled by
the faulty physics of his time. Future generations,
working with perfected instruments, may not sustain
him all along the line of his observations, even, let alone
his inferences. But how one's egotism shrivels and
shrinks as one grasps the import of his sweeping
thoughts!