ioo HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



the liberality with which lie conferred civil honours 

 ami pecuniary rewards on Joseph Fraunhofer, he has 

 immortalised his own name and added a new lustre 

 to the Bavarian crown." The German and other 

 astronomers, who refused to accept Oeorgium Suiua 

 as a name for the planet discovered by Herscln 1. were 

 ri-ht, as tilings then stood: the King, who then did 

 so shabbily by the astronomer, deserved neither part 

 nor lot in the astronomer's heavens ; and the common 

 sense of mankind gave him none. But the King was 

 unfairly judged, notwithstanding 



This encouragement of science stood on a diH'n.nt 

 footing from the degradation of private patronage and 

 fulsome dedications, to which literature had been 

 subjected, and from which it had shaken itself free. 

 But both literature and science were exposed to 

 another danger than neglect disparagement and envy 

 from within their own borders. In the case of 

 Herschel we have a curious example of what seems 

 this meanness, written in 1830, eight years after his 

 death: "Herschel's fame rests on discoveries, for 

 which he was indebted solely to the great power of 

 his telescope. That of the planet, sometimes called 

 by his name, was an accidental discovery, in which 

 genius had no part, and which could not have been 

 much longer deferred He did not, like his illustrious 

 contemporaries Delambre and Piazzi, distinguish him- 

 self by the amelioration of the tables, or the reduction 

 of catalogues of the stars, or by improving methods of 

 computation, or indeed by any labour of practical 

 utility. He devoted himself to the observation of 

 astronomical phenomena, and in this department his 

 unrivalled telescopes gave him a sort of supremacy. 



