And what is the outcome of it all? It is not Uranus, nor the satellites,
nor even the double stars and the nebulae considered as mere objects: it
is the beginning of a science of the stars.

[Illustration: FIG. 85.--CAROLINE HERSCHEL.

_From a Drawing from Life, by_ GEORGE MUeLLER, 1847.]

Hitherto the stars had only been observed for nautical and practical
purposes. Their times of rising and southing and setting had been noted;
they had been treated as a clock or piece of dead mechanism, and as
fixed points of reference. All the energies of astronomers had gone out
towards the solar system. It was the planets that had been observed.
Tycho had observed and tabulated their positions. Kepler had found out
some laws of their motion. Galileo had discovered their peculiarities
and attendants. Newton and Laplace had perceived every detail of their
laws.

But for the stars--the old Ptolemaic system might still have been true.
They might still be mere dots in a vast crystalline sphere, all set at
about one distance, and subservient to the uses of the earth.

Herschel changed all this. Instead of sameness, he found variety;
instead of uniformity of distance, limitless and utterly limitless
fields and boundless distances; instead of rest and quiescence, motion
and activity; instead of stagnation, life.

[Illustration: FIG. 86.--The double-double star [epsilon] Lyrae as seen
under three different powers.]

Yes, that is what Herschel discovered--the life and activity of the
whole visible universe. No longer was our little solar system to be the
one object of regard, no longer were its phenomena to be alone
interesting to man. With Herschel every star was a solar system. And
more than that: he found suns revolving round suns, at distances such as
the mind reels at, still obeying the same law of gravitation as pulls an
apple from a tree. He tried hard to estimate the distance of the stars
from the earth, but there he failed: it was too hopeless a problem. It
was solved some time after his death by Bessel, and the distances of
many stars are now known but these distances are awful and unspeakable.
Our distance from the sun shrinks up into a mere speck--the whole solar
system into a mere unit of measurement, to be repeated hundreds of
thousands of times before we reach the stars.

Yet their motion is visible--yes, to very accurate measurement quite
plain. One star, known as 61 Cygni, was then and is now rushing along at
the r