The observations made by Herschel himself eventually proved fatal to the disc theory—a hypothesis which he had all along held very lightly. His ideas about subordinate clusters within the Milky Way were soon confirmed, and though in 1799 he still adhered to the disc theory, he wrote in 1802, “I am now convinced, by a long inspection and continued examination of it, that the Milky Way itself consists of stars very differently scattered from those which are immediately about us. This immense starry aggregation is by no means uniform. The stars of which it is composed are very unequally scattered”—a conclusion quite opposed to the disc theory, where the Milky Way was supposed to be merely an extended portion of the Universe. In 1811 Herschel wrote as follows: “I must freely confess that by continuing my sweeps of the heavens, my opinion of the arrangement of the stars, and their magnitudes, and some other particulars, has undergone a gradual change; and, indeed, when the novelty of the subject is considered we cannot be surprised that many things formerly taken for granted should on examination prove to be different from what they were generally but incautiously supposed to be. For instance, an equal scattering of the stars may be admitted in certain calculations; but when we examine the Milky Way, or the closely compressed clusters of stars, of which my catalogues have recorded so many instances, this supposed equality of scattering must be given up.” This was the virtual abandonment of the disc theory. Six years later Herschel announced that in six cases he had failed to resolve the Milky Way, stating that his telescopes could not fathom it. This was the abandonment of his second assumption—namely, that his telescope was sufficiently powerful to penetrate to the limits of the Universe. Yet he still thought that some of the star-clusters might be external galaxies, although he could not even dogmatically assert our Universe to be limited. In an error of translation, Struve left the impression that Herschel believed our Universe to be unfathomable or infinite, and was obliged to devise a most artificial theory of the extinction of light to account for the fact that the sky did not shine with the brilliance of the Sun, which it would do were the stars infinite in number. Of course, Herschel did not actually believe the Universe to be infinite, and, had he lived, he would probably have shown that all the star-clusters which we see are included within the bounds of our finite Galaxy.