SAINT CUTHBERT. THE sun went down on the ocean drear: From the monkish band and the sacred pile: Alone at last with his God to be! No footstep gave to the world a trace Of the path he took to his resting place: 'Twas a lone, lone rock, that reared its crest From the sea-girt lair of its ocean nest; The cliffs rose black on the seaman's view, Where gleamed the wings of the white sea-mew, Whose hoarse cry, borne o'er the surges drear, Smote on the passing mariner's ear. The exiled saint no Eden sought To chain to earth one heaven-bound thought; From its long, long gaze on the far off sky. He scrap'd from hollows; fain to rear O, glorious scene and strange! (for him, Upon the holy man within That humble cell, who prayed and wept D THE GREAT NEBULA IN ORION. BY RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A. F.R.A.S. URING the first four months of the year, the constellation Orion is very favourably situated for observation in the evening. This magnificent asterism is more easily recognised than the Great Bear, Cassiopeia's Chair, or the fine festoon of stars which adorns the constellation Perseus. There is, indeed, a peculiarity about Orion which tends considerably to facilitate recognition. The other constellations named above, gyrate round the pole in a manner which presents them to us in continually varying positions. It is not so with Orion. Divided centrally by the equator, the mighty hunter continues twelve hours above and twelve hours below the horizon. His shoulders are visible somewhat more, his feet somewhat less, than twelve hours. When he is in the south, he is seen as a giant with upraised arms, erect, and having one knee bent, as if he were ascending a height. Before him, as if raised on his left arm, is a curve of small stars, forming the shield, or target of lion's skin, which he is represented as uprearing in the face of Taurus. When Orion is in the east, his figure is inclined backwards; when he is setting, he seems to be bent forwards, as if rushing down a height: but he is never seen in an inverted position, like the northern constellations. And we may note in passing, that the figure of Orion, as he sets, does not exactly correspond with the image presented in that fine passage in Maud: I arose, and all by myself, in my own dark garden ground, and again, towards the end of the poem : It fell on a time of year When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs, I would not, however, for one moment be understood as finding fault with these passages of Tennyson's noble poem. Detached from the context, the image is undoubtedly faulty; but there is a correctness in the very incorrectness of the image, placed as it is in the mouth of one Raging alone as his father raged in his On a horror of shattered limbs.... Mangled and flattened and crushed. Let us pass on, however, to the subject of our paper. Beneath the three bright stars which form the belt of Orion, are several small stars, ranged, when Orion is in the south, in a vertical direction. These form the sword of the giant. On a clear night it is easy to see that the middle star of the sword presents a peculiarity appearance: it shines as through of a diffused haze. In an opera-glass this phenomenon is yet more easily recognisable. A very small telescope exhibits the cause of the peculiarity, for it is at once seen, that what seemed a star is in reality a mass of small stars intermixed with a diffused nebulosity. It is a very remarkable circumstance that Galileo, whose small telescopes, directed to the clear skies of Italy, revealed so many interesting phenomena, failed to detect That marvellous round of milky light But It would not, indeed, have been very remarkable if he had simply failed to notice this object. he would seem to have directed his attention for some time especially to the region in the midst of which Orion's nebula is found. He says: At first I meant to delineate the whole of this constellation; but on account of the immense multitude of stars-being also hampered through want of leisure-I left the completion of this design till I should have another opportunity. He therefore directed his attention wholly to a space of about ten square degrees, between the belt and sword, in which space he counted no less than four hundred stars. What is yet more remarkable, he mentions the fact that there are many small spots on the heavens shining with a light resembling that of the Milky Way (complures similis coloris areola sparsim per æthera subfulgeant); and he even speaks of nebule of this sort in the head and belt and sword of Orion. He asserts, however, that by means of his telescope, these nebula were distinctly resolved into stars— a circumstance which, as we shall see presently, renders his description wholly inapplicable to the great nebula. Yet the very star around which (in the naked eye view) this nebula appears to cling, is figured in Galileo's drawing of the belt and sword of Orion! It seems almost inconceivable that Galileo should have overlooked the nebula, assuming its appearance in his day to have resembled that which it has at present. And as it appears to have been established, that if the nebula has changed at all during the past century it has changed very slowly indeed, one can scarcely believe that in Galileo's time it should have presented a very different aspect. Is it possible that the view suggested by Humboldt is correct-that Galileo did not see the nebula because he did not wish to see it? Galileo,' says Humboldt, 'was disinclined to admit or assume the existence of starless nebula.' Long after the discovery of the great nebula in Andromeda -known as the transcendently beautiful queen of the nebulæ 'Galileo omitted all mention in his works of any but starry nebulæ. The last-named nebula was discovered in 1614, by Simon Marius, whose claims to the discovery of Jupiter's satellites had greatly angered Galileo, and had called forth a torrent of invective, in which the Protestant German was abused as a heretic by Galileo, little aware that he would himself before long incur the displeasure of the Church. If we could suppose that an willingness, either to confirm his rival's discovery of a starless nebula, or to acknowledge that he had himself fallen into an error on the subject of nebulæ, prevented Galileo from speaking about the great nebula in Orion, we should be compelled to form but a low opinion of his honesty. It happens too frequently that un The man of science himself is fonder of An eye well practised in nature, a spirit glory, and vainbounded and poor. That Hevelius, 'the star-cataloguer,' should have failed to detect the Orion nebula is far less remarkable; for Hevelius objected to the use of telescopes in the work of cataloguing stars. He determined the position of each star by looking at the star through minute holes or pinnules, at the ends of a long rod attached to an instrument resembling the quadrant. The actual discoverer of the great nebula was Huyghens, in 1656. The description he gives of the discovery is so animated and interesting, that we shall translate it at length. He says: While I was observing the variable belts of Jupiter, a dark band across the centre of Mars, and some indistinct phenomena on his disc, I detected among the fixed stars an appearance resembling nothing which had ever been seen before, so far as I am aware. This phenomenon can only be seen with large telescopes such as I myself make use of. Astronomers reckon that there are three stars in the sword of Orion, which lie very close to each other. But as I was looking, in the year 1656, through my 23-feet telescope, at the middle of the sword, I saw, in place of one star, no less than twelve stars-which, indeed, is no unusual occurrence with powerful telescopes. Three of these stars seem to be almost in contact, and with these were four others which shone as through a haze, so that the space around shone much more brightly than the rest of the sky. And as the heavens were serene and appeared very dark, there seemed to be a gap in this part, through which a view was disclosed of brighter heavens beyond. All this I have continued to see up to the present time [the work in which these remarks appear-the Systema Saturnium-was published in 1659], so that this singular object, whatever it is, may be inferred to remain constantly in that part of the sky. I certainly have never seen anything resembling it in any other of the fixed stars. For other objects once thought to be nebulous, and the Milky Way itself, show no mistiness when looked at through telescopes, nor are they anything but congeries of stars thickly clustered together. Huyghens does not seem to have noticed that the space between the three stars he described as close to gether is perfectly free from nebulous light-insomuch that if the nebula itself is rightly compared to a gap in the darker heavens, this spot resembles a gap within the nebula. And, indeed, it is not uninteresting to notice how comparatively inefficient was Huyghens' telescope, though it was nearly eight yards in focal length. A good achromatic telescope two feet long would reveal more than Huy. ghens was able to detect with his unwieldy instrument. Dominic Cassini soon after discovered a fourth star near the three seen by Huyghens. The four form the celebrated trapezium, an object interesting to the possessors of moderately good telescopes, and which has also been a subject of close investigation by professed astronomers. Besides the four stars seen by Cassini, there have been found five minute stars within and around the trapezium. These tiny objects seem to shine with variable brilliancy; for sometimes one will surpass the rest, while at others it will be almost invisible. After Cassini's discovery, pictures were made of the great nebula by Picard, Le Gentil, and Messier. These present no features of special interest. It is as we approach the present time, and find the great nebula the centre of quite a little warfare among astronomers -now claimed as an ally by one party, now by their opponents-that we begin to attach an almost romantic interest to the investigation of this remarkable object. In the year 1811, Sir W. Herschel announced that he had (as he supposed) detected changes in the Orion nebula. The announcement appeared in connection with a very remarkable theory respecting nebulæ generally-Herschel's celebrated hypothesis of the conversion of some nebulæ into stars. The astronomical world now heard for the first time of that self-luminous nebulous matter, distributed in a highly attenuated form throughout the celestial regions, which Her schel looked upon as the material from which the stars have been originally formed. There is an allusion to this theory in those words of the Princess Ida: no signs of systematic aggregation or of central condensation. In some nebula he traced the approach towards the formation of subordinate centres of attraction; while There sinks the nebulous star we call the in others, again, a single centre of Few theories have met with a stranger fate. Received respectfully at first on the authority of the great astronomer who propounded it—then' in the zenith of his fame-the theory gradually found a place in nearly all astronomical works. But, in the words of a distinguished living astronomer, The bold hypothesis did not receive that confirmation from the labours of subsequent inquirers which is so remarkable in the case many of Herschel's other speculations.' It came to pass at length that the theory was looked upon by nearly all English astronomers as wholly untenable. In Germany it was never abandoned, however, and a great modern discovery has suddenly brought it into general favour, and has in this, as in so many other instances, vindicated Herschel's claim to be looked upon as the most clear-sighted, as well as the boldest and most original of astronomical theorisers. But we are anticipating. Herschel had pointed out various circumstances which, in his opinion, justified a belief in the existence of a nebulous substance-fire-mist or star-mist, as it has been termed throughout interstellar space. He had discovered and observed several thousand nebulæ, and he considered that amongst these he could detect traces of progressive development. Some nebula were, he supposed, comparatively young; they showed began to be noticeable. He showed the various steps by which aggregation of the former kind might be supposed to result in the formation of star-clusters, and condensation of the latter kind into the formation of conspicuous single stars. But it was felt that the strongest part of Herschel's case lay in his reference to the great nebula of Orion. He pointed out that amongst all the nebula which might be reasonably assumed to be star-systems, a certain proportionality had always been found to exist between the telescope which first detected a nebula and that which effected its resolution into stars. And this was what might be expected to happen with starsystems lying beyond our galactic system. But how different is this from what was seen in the case of the Orion nebula. Here is an object so brilliant as to be visible to the naked eye, and which is found on examination to cover a large region of the heavens. And yet the most powerful telescopes had failed to show the slightest symptom of resolution. Were we to believe that we saw here a system of suns so far off that no telescope could exhibit the separate existence of the component luminaries, and therefore (considering merely the observed extent of the nebula, which is undoubtedly but a faint indication of its real dimensions) so inconceivably enormous in extent that the star-system of which our sun is a member shrinks into nothingness in comparison? Surely it seemed far more reasonable to recognise in the Orion nebula but a portion of our galaxy, a portion very vast in extent, but far inferior to that 'limitless ocean of universes' presented to us by the other view. |