ABSTRACT
Already in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant and Johann Lambert conceived a hierarchical universe of stars clustered into larger systems, which today we call galaxies, and which, in turn, were clustered into larger systems and so on. This hierarchical view of the universe was proposed by John Herschel and Richard Proctor in the nineteenth century as a solution to Olber’s paradox and was defended vigorously at the beginning of the twentieth century by several astronomers, including Carl Charlier and Fournier d’Albe (for a historical approach to the hierarchical universe, see Harrison 2000). More recently, Gerard de Vaucouleurs (1970) found observational evidence supporting this idea in the distribution of galaxies in clusters and superclusters.
