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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 61. 



a glimpse of the German lad bred to music as a 

 trade and penury as a condition of life, and are 

 hurried along to another glimpse of the fashion- 

 able organist of Bath who has risen to the dig- 

 nity of professional life, who cultivates the sci- 

 ences as an amateur and, what is more to the 

 purpose, who has become an Englishman by 

 adoption. 



We encounter here the cliie to William Her- 

 schel's success in life, an ardent temperament 

 coupled with an insatiable greed for knowledge 

 and tireless activity in its pursuit. From one 

 point of view it is proper enough to describe as 

 a lucky accident the discovery of Uranus which 

 transformed the amateur into the professional 

 astronomer, supplied by royal favor with oppor- 

 tunity, which it would be mockery to call leisure, 

 for the building of telescopes and their use in 

 explorations of the heavens. But such a char- 

 acterization of the turning point in William 

 Herschel's career is less than half tlie truth, and 

 it is the province of his biographer to insist that 

 zeal and diligence such as his make circum- 

 stances and constrain luck to follow them. 



We shall not pursue the career which rising 

 from humble beginnings culminates in the pres- 

 idency of the Eoyal Society, and closes at the 

 end of a long lifetime with perhaps a sugges- 

 tion of waning enthusiasm coupled with broken 

 bodily powers. Nor can the career of Caroline, 

 all too briefly told, detain us for more than a 

 glance at its simple loyalty and devotion to her 

 brothers' plans in life, a devotion whose dignity 

 is given a tinge of mingled pathos and humor 

 by her own words anent the reluctant change 

 of vocation from music to astronomy: "I have 

 been throughout annoyed and hindered in my 

 endeavors at perfecting myself in any branch of 

 knowledge by which I could hope to gain a 

 creditable livelihood." 



The career of Sir John Herschel, marked 

 though it be with brilliant talents and high 

 achievements, conveys nevertheless a sense of 

 disappointment. The father's steadfastness of 

 purpose was lacking in the son, and we confess 

 to a feeling of regret that the telescopes, great 

 and small, which furnished work for his early 

 manhood were laid away in middle life, never 

 again to be seriously used. Whether Sir John's 

 successive inclinations to mathematics, to the 



bar, to astronomy, chemistry, physics and politi- 

 cal office shall be called versatility or vacilla- 

 tion perchance depends as much upon the 

 critic's mood as on aught else, but we cannot 

 doubt that however they be named they were 

 a limitation upon the achievement possible to 

 any talent placed as was his at the beginning of 

 the era of specialization. 



With that part of the author's work which 

 sets forth the relation of the Herschels to mod- 

 ern astronomy we are less pleased, and we 

 opine that no injustice is done in characterizing 

 the spirit of her pages with the maxim of 

 political strife, ' Claim everything ! Claim it 

 with confidence !' The contributions of the 

 Herschels to modern astronomy are unques- 

 tionably great, but they did not build the entire 

 edifice nor even lay all of the foundations. 

 " The powers of the telescope were so unexpec- 

 tedly increased that they may almost be said 

 to have been discovered by William Herschel. ' ' 

 " He made the first attempt to lay down a defi- 

 nite scale of star magnitudes." " Herschel was 

 in the highest and widest sense the founder of 

 sidereal astronomy." "All modern efforts to 

 widen telescopic capacity primarily derive their 

 impulse from Herschel's passionate desire to 

 see further and to see better than his predeces- 

 sors." Such are samples of what we must con- 

 sider exaggerated pretentions which may be 

 pardoned in an obituary discourse, but not in a 

 critical estimate of the lines of development of 

 modern science. 



Nor is the author altogether free from slips 

 upon the technical side of her subject. Thus if 

 ' a one-inch glass actually quintuples the diam- 

 eter of the visible universe, it gives access to ' 

 one hundred and twenty-five times, and not to 

 ' seventy-five times the volume of space ranged 

 through by the unassisted eye.' But it may 

 well be doubted if the relation itself is not 

 wholly fallacious. Nor is it true that ' the 

 whole system of micrometrical measurements 

 came into existence through Herschel's double- 

 star determinations.' Gascoign, Auzout, Roe- 

 mer and probably others used the filar micro- 

 meter before Herschel's time, if not in his 

 manner. So also we may be permitted to doubt 

 whether most of the double star orbits at pres- 

 ent known have been calculated by the method 



