40 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



crack, and broke into two pieces. On looking at 

 Fahrenheit's thermometer, I found it to stand at 11." 

 And, in the height of summer that year, " the telescope 

 ran with water all the night," that is, " the condensing 

 moisture on the tube has been running down in 

 streams." "The small speculum, which sometimes 

 gathers moisture, was never affected in the 7 -feet tube, 

 but was a little so in the 20-feet. The large eye- 

 glasses and object-glasses of the finders required 

 wiping very often." Such were some of the discom- 

 forts cheerfully undergone by this votary of science in 

 pursuit of truth. 1 



Amid labours so continuous and so heavy it cannot 

 occasion surprise that Caroline sometimes found relief 

 in a fit of grumbling. When her brother was polishing 

 a mirror, " by way of keeping him alive, she was con- 

 stantly obliged to feed him by putting the victuals by 

 bits into his mouth. This was once the case when, in 

 order to finish a seven-foot mirror, he had not taken his 

 hands from it for sixteen hours together." 2 The 

 delicate lad, who, by his mother's address, escaped 

 soldiering in 1757, had grown into a powerful athlete 

 in 1772. This sometimes happens. Four years later 

 he tried to improve on Newton's telescope by almost 

 doubling the light let fall on the mirror at the bottom 

 of the tube. He then experimented with a ten-feet 

 reflector, but failed. He repeated the attempt with a 

 twenty-feet in 1784, but again was disappointed : " it 

 was too hastily laid aside." He succeeded shortly after, 

 and found " it to be a very convenient and pleasant as 

 well as useful way of observing " : it inverts the north 



1 Phil. Trans., 1803, pp. 215-19. 



2 Lalande told the same story in 1783. See Arago. 



