SOME SELF-MADE ASTRONOMERS. 341 



Leverrier, who died Director of the Paris Observatory, and who 

 occupied himself more than any other astronomer with calculations 

 of the motions of the planets, was intended to be an engineer. He 

 was employed in the excise, when he suddenly discovered that the 

 science of the skies was his vocation. It is well known that astronomy 

 owes to him the discovery of the planet Neptune, which was the result 

 of a mathematical calculation. 



Olbers, who contributed so much to the theory for determining 

 the orbits of comets, was a practicing physician in Bremen. He was 

 accustomed to spend his evenings at home, after the day's round of 

 calls, in reading for pleasure works on astronomy, to which science he 

 rendered considerable services, while as a doctor he was in no way 

 distinguished from the host of his competitors. 



Th. von Oppolzer, to whom science is indebted for some splendid 

 labors, intended first to embrace the career of his father, who was a 

 distinguished physician ; but he had hardly got his first case, when he 

 was seized by the demon of astronomy ; and he forever abandoned his 

 early profession to devote himself to that science. 



The great Herschel was a hautboy-player in a Hanoverian regi- 

 ment, and the thought of being an astronomer never occurred to him 

 till he was forty years old. At that time he wanted to get a telescope, 

 and, as he had no means with which to buy one, he made one himself, 

 and with it discovered Uranus. He was then made a doctor at Ox- 

 ford, and entered the service of the English Government, with whose 

 aid he was able to build his monster telescope. He afterward explored 

 the sky to very remote depths, discovering nebulas, and studying 

 double stars and clusters of stars. 



The astronomers whose stories have just been told are not excep- 

 tions. It must rather be admitted, as a general rule, that all the men 

 who have made epochs in astronomy were deserters, or persons who had 

 left some other profession to engage in astronomy. The academicians 

 may confront me, on this point, with the life of the great Gauss. This 

 celebrated astronomer, one of the greatest of all time, did indeed 

 follow the direct road, but that was only because of his having, when 

 he was young, attracted the attention of the Duke Charles William 

 Ferdinand of Brunswick. It is very probable that, but for this cir- 

 cumstance, he would have become something very different, perhaps 

 a mason, or a fountain-builder, or an employe of the burial-ofiice 

 three trades which his father carried on together. But it is quite as 

 certain that Gauss would sooner or later have become an astronomer 

 as that Raphael, as Lessing says, would have become a painter, even 

 if he had lost his hands. 



Frederick William Bessel, one of the most eminent astronomers of 

 the nineteenth century, had been destined by his father to become a 

 merchant, and the young man, who had a strong distaste for Latin 

 and considerable fondness for mathematics, engaged in his studies 



