Sir J, Herschells address 



rest indisputably with Mr. Henderson. At present, however, we 

 should not be justified in so far anticipating a decision which time 

 alone can stamp with the sea! of absolute authenticity. 



Gentlemen of the Astronomical Society, I congratulate you and 

 myself that we have lived to see the great and hitherto impassable 

 barrier to our excursions into the sidereal universe ; that barrier 

 against which we have chafed so long and so vainly — (cestuantes 

 angusto limite mundi) — almost simultaneously overleaped at three 

 different points. It is the greatest and most glorious triumph which 

 practical astronomy has ever witnessed. Perhaps I ought not to 

 speak so strongly — perhaps I should hold some reserve in favour of 

 the bare possibility that it may be all an illusion — and that further 

 researches, as they have repeatedly before, so may now fail to sub- 

 stantiate this noble result. But I confess myself unequal to such 

 prudence under such excitement. Let us rather accept the joyful 

 omens of the time, and trust that as the barrier has begun to yield 

 it will speedily be effectually prostrated. Such results are among 

 the fairest flowers of civilization. They justify the vast expenditure 

 of time and talent which have led up to them ; they justify the lan- 

 guage which men of science hold, or ought to hold, when they 

 appeal to the governments of their respective countries for the libe- 

 ral devotion of the national means in furtherance of the great objects 

 they propose to accomplish. They enable them not only to hold 

 out but to redeem their promises, when they profess themselves pro- 

 ductive labourers in a higher and richer field than that of mere ma- 

 terial and physical advantages. It is then when they become (if I 

 may venture on such a figure without irreverence) the messengers 

 from heaven to earth of such stupendous announcements as must 

 strike every one who hears them with almost awful admiration, 

 that they may claim to be listened to when they repeat in every 

 variety of urgent instance, that these are not the last of such an- 

 nouncements which they shall have to communicate, — that there 

 are yet behind, to search out and to declare, not only secrets on 

 nature which shall increase the wealth or power of man, but truths 

 which shall ennoble the age and the country in which they are divul- 

 ged, and by dilating the intellect, react on the moral character of 

 mankind. Such truths are things quite as worthy of struggles and 



