1/6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



any one would learn the methods^ he must tread the path again, 

 learning by rejection and selection that which has not been 

 and perhaps could not be communicated. How much of such 

 knowledge goes out of life with men like Stokes and Huggins ! 

 Yet we would not have it otherwise ; the ver}' beginnings 

 of regret are hidden in the thought of the wealth they have 

 left behind. 



Let us look for a moment over the ground wherein Huggins 

 sought his opportunity. Here we can avail ourselves of his 

 own words, for in the Nineteenth Century for June 1897 he gave 

 a short epitome of his life's work under the title " The New 

 Astronomy : A Personal Retrospect." 



" At the time that I purchased my present house, Tulse Hill 

 was much more than now in the country and away from the 

 smoke of London. It was after a little hesitation that I decided 

 to give my chief attention to observational astronom}^ for I was 

 strongly under the spell of the rapid discoveries then taking 

 place in microscopical research in connection with physiology." 

 [He had joined the Microscopical Society in 1852 and the whole 

 of his life's work shows how strongly his mind was attracted 

 to the application of micrometrical methods to the elucidation 

 of large problems.] 



" In 1856 I built a convenient observatory opening by a 

 passage from the house and raised so as to command an un- 

 mterrupted view of the sky except on the north side. It consisted 

 of a dome twelve feet in diameter and a transit room. There was 

 erected in it an equatorially mounted telescope by Dollond of 

 five inches aperture, at that time looked upon as a large rather 

 than a small instrument. I commenced work on the usual lines, 

 taking transits, observing and making drawings of planets. 

 Some of Jupiter now lying before me, I venture to think, would 

 not compare unfavourably with drawings made with the larger 

 instruments of the present day. 



" About that time Mr. Alvan Clark, the founder of the 

 American firm famous for the construction of the great object- 

 glasses of the Lick and the Yerkes Observatories, then a portrait 

 painter by profession, began, as an amateur, to make object- 

 glasses of large size for that time and of very great merit. 

 Specimens of his earliest work came into the hands of my friend 

 Mr. Dawes and received the high approval of that distinguished 

 judge. In 1858 I purchased from Mr. Dawes an object-glass by 

 Alvan Clark of eight inches diameter, which he parted with to 

 make room for a lens of a larger diameter by a quarter of an inch 

 which Mr. Clark had undertaken to make for him. I paid the 

 price that it had cost Mr. Dawes — namely ^200. This telescope 



