CHAPTER VIII 



"THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HEAVENS" 1 



THE writer who described Herschel's papers as " lively 

 and amusing " may have intended a sneer, but he did 

 a great wrong to inquiries and facts as novel as they 

 were inspiring. Whatever helps to lift man's thoughts 

 above the littlenesses of life and time is a distinct gain 

 to the human race, altogether irrespective of the uses 

 to which, in course of time, it may be applied. 

 Herschel's papers on The Construction of the Heavens 

 were of this nature. They were among the first he 

 wrote ; they were also among the last. He wrote at 

 least eight papers on the subject, covering three 

 hundred and thirty quarto pages : he began the 

 series* in 1784, he finished it in 1818, and he left 

 the work as a legacy to his son, who nobly honoured 

 his father's memory by doing for the southern hemi- 

 sphere what the father did for the northern. Even 

 though these labours had been nothing more than an 

 attempt on man's part to penetrate the workshop of 



1 This is Herschel's own phrase, taken probably from the notice of 

 Ptolemy's Almagest (145 A.D.) in Lalande's Astronomy (1771 A.D.), 

 where its title is given in Latin, Magna Construct (i. 156). The 

 phrase does not deserve the condemnation it received from an Edin- 

 burgh Reviewer in January 1803 ; but a later Reviewer accepts it in 

 July 1848, "to use a phrase which Sir "W. Herschel introduced" 

 (p, 105). " Introduced" is scarcely correct, 



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