The splendour of the celestial objects as viewed with this vast "light-grasper" surpassed all expectation. "Never in my life," exclaimed Sir James South, "did I see such glorious sidereal pictures."[327] The orb of Jupiter produced an effect compared to that of the introduction of a coach-lamp into the telescope;[328] and certain star-clusters exhibited an appearance (we again quote Sir James South) "such as man before had never seen, and which for its magnificence baffles all description." But it was in the examination of the nebulæ that the superiority of the new instrument was most strikingly displayed. A large number of these misty objects, which the utmost powers of Herschel's specula had failed to resolve into stars, yielded at once to the Parsonstown reflector; while many others showed under entirely changed forms through the disclosure of previously unseen details of structure.
One extremely curious result of the increase of light was the abolition of any sharp distinction between the two classes of "annular" and "planetary" nebulæ. Up to that time, only four ring-shaped systems--two in the northern and two in the southern hemisphere--were known to astronomers; they were now reinforced by five of the planetary kind, the discs of which were observed to be centrally perforated; while the definite margins visible in weaker instruments were replaced by ragged edges or filamentous fringes.
Still more striking was the discovery of an entirely new and most remarkable species of nebulæ. These were termed "spiral," from the more or less regular convolutions, resembling the whorls of a shell, in which the matter composing them appeared to be distributed. The first and most conspicuous specimen of this class was met with in April, 1845; it is situated in Canes Venatici, close to the tail of the Great Bear, and wore, in Sir J. Herschel's instruments, the aspect of a split ring encompassing a bright nucleus, thus presenting, as he supposed, a complete analogue to the system of the Milky Way. In the Rosse mirror it shone out as a vast whirlpool of light--a stupendous witness to the presence of cosmical activities on the grandest scale, yet regulated by laws as to the nature of which we are profoundly ignorant. Professor Stephen Alexander of New Jersey, however, concluded, from an investigation (necessarily founded on highly precarious data) of the mechanical condition of these extraordinary agglomerations, that we see in them "the partially scattered fragments of enormous masses once rotating in a state of dynamical equilibrium." He further suggested "that the separation of these fragments may still be in progress,"[329] and traced back their origin to the disruption, through its own continually accelerated rotation, of a "primitive spheroid" of inconceivably vast dimensions. Such also, it was added (the curvilinear form of certain outliers of the Milky Way giving evidence of a spiral structure), is probably the history of our own cluster; the stars composing which, no longer held together in a delicately adjusted system like that of the sun and planets, are advancing through a period of seeming confusion towards an appointed goal of higher order and more perfect and harmonious adaptation.[330]