Views of the Architecture of the Heavens(ISBN=) 英文原版

John Pringle Nichol (1804–59) was a Scottish polymath whose
major interests were economics and astronomy; he did much to
popularise the latter by his writings. He became Regius Professor
of Astronomy at Glasgow in 1836, and in the following year
published Views of the Architecture of the Heavens which was
immediately successful. George Eliot wrote in a letter of 1841, ‘I
have been revelling in Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens and
Phenomena of the Solar System, and have been in imagination winging
my flight from system to system, and from universe to universe …’
Nichol was a supporter of the nebular hypothesis – that stars form
in massive and dense clouds of molecular hydrogen which are
gravitationally unstable, and coalesce to smaller denser clumps,
which then collapse and form stars – which in modified form is the
model most widely accepted today.

Part I. The Form of the Existing Universe: Letter
1. General considerations on the system of the universe
Letter 2. The power and reach of telescopes
Letter 3. Aspects, forms and distances of remote firmaments
Part II. The Constituent Mechanisms, or the Principle of the
Vitality of Stellar Arrangements: Letter
4. Probable universality of planetary systems
Letter 5. Triple stars
Part III. The Origin and Probable Destiny of the Present Form of
the Material Creation
Letter 6. The nebulae
Letter 7. The nebular hypothesis
Letter 8. Speculation
Notes
Additions and corrections