OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: JUNE 4, 1872. 465 



ambitious of reaffirming the discoveries of his father in the northern 

 hemisphere, and of completing them by an independent survey of the 

 southern stars and nebulae. For this purpose, he was first associated 

 with Sir James South, an amateur astronomer of immense zeal and am- 

 ple means. The union was a happy one for both, and for astronomy, 

 inasmuch as it placed at Herschel's disposal instruments of the first class, 

 and secured to the work which had been undertaken the advantage of 

 a highly gifted and well-trained mind. While this partnership lasted, 

 observations and measurements were made on 380 double or triple stars, 

 and promptly published. 



Soon after this, we find Herschel established in the spot of greatest 

 interest to all astronomers, and to him above all others, namely, in the 

 old observatory at Slough. Provided with a reflecting telescope of 18 

 inches aperture, in the construction of which he had the advice of his 

 father, he began to sweep the sky for double stars and nebulae, as his 

 father had done before him, and with equal success, though he missed 

 the valuable assistance which his father had enjoyed in Miss Caroline 

 L. Herschel. In spite of this disadvantage, and without the mechani- 

 cal appliances which Struve enjoyed, and the still greater conveniences 

 which both would have found in the chronographic method of re- 

 cent times, catalogue after catalogue of double stars, clusters, and 

 nebulae, many of which had escaped the piercing eye of the father, 

 poured into the volumes of the Royal Society and the Astronomical So- 

 ciety, and Slough became once more a centre of intense intellectual ac- 

 tivity. Herschel was now more than forty years old. And if he had 

 been less ambitious, or less courageous, or less devoted to astronomy, he 

 might have been content with the laurels already won. But he knew that 

 there was a new world of astronomy to be conquered in the southern 

 hemisphere, — a zone of more than fifty degrees encircling the south 

 pole, no star of which could ever shine in his telescope at Slough,, however 

 penetrating. Now and then an astronomer, like La Caille, had been 

 despatched thither for a specific purpose and for a brief residence, and 

 observatories, more or less permanent, had been established at the Cape 

 of Good Hope and at Paramatta ; but no one, before Herschel, had 

 dreamed of making an exhaustive survey of those strange skies, of 

 which the eloquent pen of Humboldt had depicted, and possibly ex- 

 aggerated, the beauties. The motives and the object of Herschel in ban- 

 ishing himself, with his family and assistants, for four years, to the Cape 

 of Good Hope, are best described in his own words. After alluding to 



vol. viii. 59 



