Here we see that his own belief about the matter is not very firm. He admits that the stars contribute not a little to the brilliancy of the nebula, and the most he can say in favour of its shining with its own light is, that it seems impossible to believe that the light has arisen merely from stellar points. He then goes on to show how the self-luminosity may be explained, as follows:--
"But here a difficulty may be suggested. The nebula is a luminous body, but ordinary gas is invisible. We do not see the gases which surround us and form the atmosphere in which we live. How, then, if the nebula consisted merely of gaseous matter, would we see it shining on the far distant heavens? A well-known experiment will at once explain this difficulty. We take a tube containing a very small quantity of some gas: for example hydrogen; this gas is usually invisible; no one could tell that there is any gas in the tube, or still less could the kind of gas be known; but pour a stream of electricity through the tube, and instantly the gas begins to glow with a violet light. What has the electricity done for us in this experiment? Its sole effect has been to heat the gas. It is, indeed, merely a convenient means of heating the gas and making it glow. It is not the electricity which we see, it is rather the gas heated by the electricity. We infer, then, that if the gas be heated it becomes luminous. The gas does not burn in the ordinary sense of the word; no chemical change has taken place. The tube contains exactly the same amount of hydrogen after the experiment that it did before. It glows with the heat just as red-hot iron glows. If, then, we could believe that in the great nebula of Orion there were vast volumes of rarefied gas in the same physical condition as the gas in the tube while the electricity was passing, then we should expect to find that this gas would actually glow."