THE ASTEROIDS 191 



discoveries made by Herschel in the system of 

 Uranus. 



The two small planets, Ceres and Pallas, discovered 

 in 1801 and 1807, have strangely given the tooth of 

 envy an opportunity of wounding the good name of 

 Herschel. As he found their discs like those of fixed 

 stars, spurious and not measurable; as they "re- 

 sembled small stars so much as hardly to be distin- 

 guished from them even by very good telescopes," as 

 he imagined them from the haziness he saw around 

 them to be " comets in disguise," he considered planet 

 a misnomer as applied to them, and proposed to call 

 them asteroids. Strange to say, the friend of Piazzi 

 and Olbers, who discovered these small bodies, was 

 charged with intending, by the suggestion of this 

 diminutive, to cast a slight on the achievement of his 

 friends, in comparison with his own glory as the dis- 

 coverer of the great planet, Uranus. A more stupid 

 slander of a most generous heart could scarcely be 

 imagined. He predicted that the association of astro- 

 nomers which had been formed on the Continent to 

 hunt for more of them would be successful: "Many 

 may soon be discovered," he informed the Royal Society. 

 Two were caught within the next five years, Juno and 

 Vesta, but the " many " foretold by Herschel in 1802 

 remained an unfulfilled prediction for more than forty 

 years. He himself joined in the hunt, and failed : " I 

 have already made five reviews of the Zodiac without 

 detecting any of these concealed objects." Yet he was 

 slandered as envious of the fame of others who had 

 done what he confessed he had failed in doing, 1 although 

 in 1813 he told Thomas Campbell, the poet, that "there 



1 Phil Trans, for 1802, pp. 228-30. 



