Nubecula minor
is much less beautiful, has more unresolvable nebulous light, while the
stellar masses are fewer and fainter in intensity. -- (From a letter of Sir
John Herschel, Feldhuysen, Cape of Good Hope, 13th June, 1836.)
The appearance of these clouds, of the brightly-beaming constellation Argo,
of the Milky Way between Scorpio, the Centaur, and the Southern Cross, the
picturesque beauty, if one may so speak, of the whole expanse of the
southern celestial hemisphere, has left upon my mind an ineffaceable
impression. The zodiacal light, which rises in a pyramidal form, and
constantly contributes, by its mild radiance, to the external beauty of the
tropical nights, is either a vast nebulous ring, rotating between the Earth
and Mars, or, less probably, the exterior stratum of the solar atmosphere.
Besides these luminous clouds and nebulae of definite form, exact and
corresponding observations indicate the existence and the general
distribution of an apparently non-luminous, infinitely-divided matter, which
posssesses a force of resistance and manifests its presence in Encke's, and
perhaps also in Biela's comet, by diminishing their eccentricity and
shortening their period of revolution. Of this impending, ethereal, and
cosmical matter, it may be supposed that it is in motion; that it
gravitates, notwithstanding its original tenuity; that it is condensed in
the vicinity of the great mass of the Sun; and, finally, that it may, for
myriads of ages, have been augmented by the vapor emanating from the tails
of comets.
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