n skies.

The full results of Herschel's journey to the Cape were not made public
until 1847, when a splendid volume[117] embodying them was brought out
at the expense of the Duke of Northumberland. They form a sequel to his
father's labours such as the investigations of one man have rarely
received from those of another. What the elder observer did for the
northern heavens, the younger did for the southern, and with generally
concordant results. Reviving the paternal method of "star-gauging," he
showed, from a count of 2,299 fields, that the Milky Way surrounds the
solar system as a complete annulus of minute stars; not, however, quite
symmetrically, since the sun was thought to lie somewhat nearer to those
portions visible in the southern hemisphere, which display a brighter
lustre and a more complicated structure than the northern branches. The
singular cosmical agglomerations known as the "Magellanic Clouds" were
now, for the first time, submitted to a detailed, though admittedly
incomplete, examination, the almost inconceivable richness and variety
of their contents being such that a lifetime might with great profit be
devoted to their study. In the Greater Nubecula, within a compass of
forty-two square degrees, Herschel reckoned 278 distinct nebulae and
clusters, besides fifty or sixty outliers, and a large number of stars
intermixed with diffused nebulosity--in all, 919 catalogued objects,
and, for the Lesser Cloud, 244. Yet this was only the most conspicuous
part of what his twenty-foot revealed. Such an extraordinary
concentration of bodies so various led him to the inevitable conclusion
that "the Nubeculae are to be regarded as systems _sui generis_, and
which have no analogues in our hemisphere."[118] He noted also the
blankness of surrounding space, especially in the case of Nubecula
Minor, "the access to which on all sides," he remarked, "is through a
desert;" as if the cosmical material in the neighbourhood had been swept
up and garnered in these mighty groups.[119]

Of southern double stars, he discovered and gave careful measurements of
2,102, and described 1,708 nebulae, of which at least 300 were new. The
list was illustrated with a number of drawings, some of them extremely
beautiful and elaborate.

Sir John Herschel's views as to the nature of nebulae were considerably
modified by Lord Rosse's success in "resolving" with his great
reflectors a crowd of these objects into stars. His former somewhat