THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS 



A careful drawing of Miss Herschel's " Sweeper " seems to 

 indicate his working model ; that the telescope was successfully 

 finished is clearly set out in his letter to Darwin, where he says " I 

 got him (Ross, the optician) to make two eye-pieces for a 

 reflector telescope just before he died, two metals for which I had 

 succeeded in making, of six and seven feet focal length, and 

 so now I can show the good people here the Mountains in the 

 Moon turned upside down, as of course they ought to be when 

 seen from the Antipodes." 



The passion for astronomy has, I think, waned lang syne, and 

 the diadochi of the earnest, elderly gentlemen who sat up with 

 the stars in frozen solitude have all retired into golf clubs. But 

 in Martens' lifetime the Victorian era found much to marvel at in 

 the discoveries of her true high priests, the men of science ; 

 and astronomical literature, from the rhapsodies of the Rev. 

 Thomas Dick to the discreet lyrism of Proctor and Flammarion, 

 wore some of the trappings of Romance the Romance of Time 

 and Space. The continuity of optical discoveries was also an 

 incentive. Nations contended for the proprietorship of the largest 

 telescope even Melbourne made a bid for supremacy and 

 comets and the canals in Mars were good newspaper copy. 



A sort of finality seems as in the case of the safety bicycle 

 to have been reached in the Lick telescope ; that mammoth height 

 once touched, there could be but decline ; and popular astro- 

 nomy is no more to us nowadays than so much archery. Yet, I 

 sometimes wonder what became of Conrad Martens' telescope. 

 To what dusty and forgotten limbo has it descended, with 

 its speculum tarnished and pitted, and its gear awry ? How fitly 

 would it grace some museum of Australian antiques, to show the 

 curious how a hard-working artist beguiled his scant hours of 

 leisure in the sixties of last century ! 



He had still another hobby, if I may be allowed the word his 

 Church ; and a staunch old-fashioned churchman was he one to 

 whom the idea of Church and State was inviolable as the Thirty- 

 nine Articles, and who would not endanger his belief by putting 

 any strain upon its cohesions. His admission that he had no 

 intention of reading the Origin of Species has a certain naive charm. 



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