246 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



described this discovery of the distance of a fixed star 

 as the greatest and most glorious triumph which prac- 

 tical astronomy has perhaps ever witnessed, and the 

 three who shared the triumph between them were 

 Bessel with 61 Cygni, Henderson 1 of Edinburgh with 

 Centauri, and Struve of Dorpat with a Lyree. Bessel's 

 object-glass, that he got cut in two to form a helio- 

 meter, Sir John saw at Munich before it was mounted, 

 considered it invaluable, and believed that genius alone 

 could have dared to divide it in two for the purposes 

 of science. Caroline Herschel's delight, in her retire- 

 ment, at the success of these three astronomers in 

 following her baffled brother's lead may be imagined. 

 To know that the parallax of a fixed star had been 

 found by Bessel to be the f^fr of a second ! To know 

 that it was a double star ! To know, besides, that the 

 smaller of the two companion stars revolved round 

 the larger in an orbit fifty times the diameter of the 

 earth's orbit round the sun, or two and a half times 

 that of Uranus ! and to know also that the pair of 

 stars were 670,000 times as distant from us as is the 

 sun ! To her these discoveries were a delightful com- 

 mentary on her brother's words " In this case, millions 

 of years are perhaps but moments." The "little old 

 woman " in the " abominable city " of Hanover, unable 

 to endure " happy England," where her dead hero was 

 buried, and where his son, her nephew, was a foremost 

 name in the world of science, revelled in the news that 



1 It is only just to Henderson to say that he was preferred by Lord 

 Advocate Jeffrey to the Edinburgh Professorship of Astronomy over 

 his rival, Thomas Carlyle. Froude was guilty of an unpardonable 

 blunder in printing the unwise and acrimonious criticism of Carlyle on 

 Henderson's fitness for the post. Facts had given a verdict in Hender- 

 son's favour. 



