110 SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL. 



feet reflector aud searcbiug for comets, tlie kiud-bearted old man used to 

 wish that the science of acoustics bad been advanced in tbe same degree 

 as the science of optics, " For," he said, " had William constructed audi- 

 tory tubes of proportionate power to his great telescope, who knows 

 but we might have been enabled to hear tbe music of tbe spheres ! " 

 From this date, fourscore aud twelve years ago, until the present time, 

 no name among modern scientific men has attained a higher rank than 

 that of Herscbel. Ninety volumes of tbe Philosophical Transactions of 

 tbe Royal Society have been enriched with papers bearing the well- 

 known signature. Genius, though often hereditary, is quite as often 

 wayward. It not unfrequently skips a generation. It descends some- 

 times to daughters. It reappears in other cases, after being dormant 

 in children and grandchildren, in a fourth or fifth step of descent. But 

 with tbe two Herscbels the transmission was immediate. Tbe original 

 circumstances of the two great philosophers were Indeed widely differ- 

 ent. Sir William, the f^ither, hy genius and application succeeded in rising 

 from obscurity to the proud position of tbe first astronomer of tbe age. 

 His son. Sir John Herscbel, had tbe advantage of the highest university 

 training. But both were gifted with extraordinary talents, keen scien- 

 tific tastes, and those great mathematical powers which so materially 

 assist in abstruse inquiries. In the case of the subject of this memoir, 

 the combination of high education with an extraordinary natural talent 

 for communicating his thoughts in an attractive manner, has been one 

 of tbe means of making him the most distinguished jibilosopber of tbe 

 nineteenth century. 



John Frederick William Herscbel was born at Slough, March 7, 1702. 

 His father was already famous. People came from distant lands to see 

 the great telescope. There are traditions about the wonder with which 

 mail-travelers used to stare, in passing, at the mechanism by which the 

 monster tube was used. A thousand stories of its revelations passed 

 current among tbe vulgar. Tbe astronomer let nobody use his forty-foot 

 telescope, but the fame of it could not be bidden. It went through all 

 tbe civilized world. And it was under tbe shadow of that mysterious 

 erection that this only child of the house— born when his father, then of 

 twoscore and twelve years, was absorbed alike in the fome he had 

 achieved and tbe wonders be was every night discovering ; reared in 

 infancy with an uncle who spent his days in adjusting instruments, and 

 an aunt whose nights were devoted to discovering new comets in tbe 

 heavens ; without a boy's associations and playmates, in a house kept quiet 

 all the day that the star-watchers might sleep ; and wandering through 

 rooms whose silence no sports were permitted to disturb and no youth- 

 ful buoyancy to interrupt— it was here that he passed bis boyhood. 

 Twelve years before the boy's birth tbe "Observations of tbe periodical 

 star Mira Ceti," read before the Iloyal Society, bad established bis 

 father's position among scientific men, aud one year later his discovery 

 of Uranus brought him into the foremost rank of astronomical observei;s. 



