HKRSCHEL'S CLAIMS 



was of the same nature aa the scientific proof that 

 steamboat* could not cross the Atlantic, and was 

 belied, as the other was, by facts. 



To Horse he 1 then belongs the credit not merely of 

 having suspected the revolution of sun round sun in 

 the far distant realms of space, but also of actually 

 detecting the fact that this was going on among the 

 tan. He has the credit also rig, with im- 



perfect appliances, measured the angles which enabled 

 him to calculate the times of n- volution of these 

 systems of suns. It was a beginning, a woni 

 beginning of a new departure in man's warfare with 

 ignorance, and with the bonds that tie him down to 

 the earth. He did not know, probably be was so 

 wrapt up in his own conceptions of the usefulness of 

 the telescope, that he could not imagine a more potent 

 re veal or of the secrets of the universe than a gigantic 



r at the bottom of a gigantic tube, or an immense 

 eye at the object end of a telescope. A glass prism 

 has done what the telescope could not do, revealed 



le stars where they were not known to exist, 



shown their rates of motion to or from us, and where 



uaeen ball is a companion to a living and a lighted 



told us what they are made of, and enabled ns 



'igh them as if th.y were in the scales of a 

 balance. To be able to do this, or apprehend the way 

 it has been done, or even to know the fact, lifts human 



o to a loftier height than it ever attained in tl..- 

 past, and the pioneer in this of mankind was 



ially a bandsman in the Hanoverian Guards, a 

 musician of Bath. Nor should it be forgotten that 

 the improvement of the telescope, with which these 

 revelations of the secret things of the starry heavens 



