16 Biographical Memoir of Sir William Hersclui. 



The physical picture of the heavens traced by Herschel, will 

 be compared with recent observations, and the changes will be 

 remarked which a long interval may have produced. Already 

 striking consequences present themselves to the mind, but time 

 alone can develope them ; and they will only become manifest 

 after a great number of ages. 



Tlien entire revolutions will be accomplished, our successors 

 will admire other phenomena and other stars ; a part of the 

 spectacle of the Heavens will be changed ; but at those remote 

 epochs the memory of Herschel will still be fresh. 



He died in the eighty-fourth year of his age, without infir- 

 mities and without pain. His name, confided to the grateful 

 sciences, is for ever preserved from oblivion, — ^they crown it 

 with immortal glory. 



Description of a New Magmetical Instrument (proposed to he 

 called the Solar Compass or Heliastron)^ with some Obser- 

 vations on subjects intimately or remotely connected with the 

 phenomena it exhibits. By Mark Watt, Esq. Member of 

 the Wernerian Natural History Society. Communicated by 

 the Author*. 



X HE effect of the sun upon the earth, and on all the animate 

 and inanimate existences that it contains, has seldom or never 

 been over-rated, but, perhaps, hitherto, has been in many minor 

 instances under-rated, or entirely overlooked. It is long,'indeed, 

 since the grand influence the sun exerts on the planetary sys- 

 tem, and the general and striking changes it produces upon the 

 world, observable in the seasons, the tides, the trade-winds, the 

 diurnal revolutions, &c. have been made objects of investigation 

 and calculation, whilst its less ostensible, though, perhaps, not 

 less important impulses on animal organisation, plants, chemical 

 changes, and delicately formed instruments for meteorological 

 observations, have been comparatively the subjects of modern 

 research. 



• Read before the Wernerian Natural History Society, 24th November 

 1827. 



