60 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



which was at once both right and absurdly wrong, 

 was coursing along the table. The lava had cooled, its 

 heat was forgotten, when Colonel Welbred quietly 

 interjected, "Sir Isaac Newton had been as much 

 scoffed and laughed at formerly as Herschel was 

 now ; but, in return, Herschel, hereafter, would be as 

 highly reverenced as Sir Isaac was at present." To 

 it they again set. Someone remarked that " upon the 

 heat in the air being mentioned to Dr. Heberden, he 

 had answered that he supposed it proceeded from the 

 last eruption in the volcano in the moon." " Ay," cried 

 Colonel Manners, " I suppose he knows as much of the 

 matter as the rest of them ; if you put a candle at the 

 end of a telescope, and let him look at it, he'll say, 

 What an eruption there is in the moon ! " 



" But Mr. Bryant himself has seen this volcano from 

 the telescope." 



" Why, I don't mind Mr. Bryant any more than Dr. 

 Heberden ; he's just as credulous as t'other." 



And thus the equerries wrangled at Windsor, while 

 the rest of the world wondered or laughed at these 

 volcanoes in the moon. 1 



Herschel's belief in an atmosphere of the moon was 

 a heritage, a traditional heritage from the past. Had 

 he fully examined the grounds on which the tradition 

 was based, he would have opened a field of inquiry 

 that remained closed for nearly a century and a half. 

 In the total eclipse of the sun which happened in 

 Switzerland on the 12th of May 1706, the red flames 

 and the corona, features of an eclipse now known to 

 everybody, were observed, apparently for the first 

 time. Captain Stannyan, who was at Berne with the 

 1 Miss Burney, Letters, iii. 375-380. 



