222 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



A slight mistake in exceedingly small measurements 

 may cause serious errors in the calculated times of 

 revolution. 



It should not be forgotten that the King's equerry 

 whom Miss Burney, in her gossip from Windsor Castle, 

 calls Colonel Welbred, foretold that time would do 

 justice to Herschel, and turn the laugh at him against 

 the laughers. And time has done him justice with a 

 most ungrudging hand. Eight years after his death, 

 it was asked by a leader of modern enlightenment, 

 " What length of time must the cosmologist suppose 

 necessary to reduce a gaseous nebula into a permanent 

 planetary system ? Experience shows pretty clearly 

 the inutility of such speculations." ... Of the moon's 

 "origin and internal structure we neither know, nor 

 ever can know, anything whatever. And if such is 

 the result of our researches respecting a body placed 

 almost in our immediate vicinity, there is little reason 

 to hope that we shall be more successful with regard 

 to those whose distances are so great that the most 

 powerful telescopes are required to render them even 

 visible." 1 This was written in 1830 ; it was ill-natured 

 disparagement of a noble attempt to solve the mysteries 

 of the universe, and to give practical proof of man's 

 kinship with God; it was wholly unscientific. In 

 1842 another greatly-extolled writer declared that in 

 that region of inquiry there did not exist any dis- 

 covered, or even, without doubt discoverable phe- 

 nomenon. 2 The equerries of Windsor might be laughed 

 at and forgiven ; the scepticism that prompted men of 

 science to bid their brethren fold their hands and do 

 nothing, was an unpardonable sin against truth. It 



1 Edin. Rev. li. 101. 2 Comte, Nineteenth Century (1897), 908. 



