HERSCHEL'S CLAIMS 223 



was of the same nature as the scientific proof that 

 steamboats could not cross the Atlantic, and was 

 belied, as the other was, by facts. 



To Herschel then belongs the credit not merely of 

 having suspected the revolution of sun round sun in 

 the far distant realms of space, but also of actually 

 detecting the fact that this was going on among the 

 stars. He has the credit also of having, with im- 

 perfect appliances, measured the angles which enabled 

 him to calculate the times of revolution of these 

 systems of suns. It was a beginning, a wonderful 

 beginning of a new departure in man's warfare with 

 ignorance, and with the bonds that tie him down to 

 the earth. He did not know, probably he was so 

 wrapt up in his own conceptions of the usefulness of 

 the telescope, that he could not imagine a more potent 

 revealer of the secrets of the universe than a gigantic 

 mirror at the bottom of a gigantic tube, or an immense 

 eye at the object end of a telescope. A glass prism 

 has done what the telescope could not do, revealed 

 double stars where they were not known to exist, 

 shown their rates of motion to or from us, and where 

 an unseen ball is a companion to a living and a lighted 

 sun, told us what they are made of, and enabled us 

 to weigh them as if they were in the scales of a 

 balance. To be able to do this, or apprehend the way 

 it has been done, or even to know the fact, lifts human 

 nature to a loftier height than it ever attained in the 

 past, and the pioneer in this elevation of mankind was 

 originally a bandsman in the Hanoverian Guards, a 

 musician of Bath. Nor should it be forgotten that 

 the improvement of the telescope, with which these 

 revelations of the secret things of the starry heavens 



