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Updated: May 23, 2025
The memoirs of Herschel are, for the greater part, pure and simple extracts from his inexhaustible journals of observations at Slough, accompanied by a few remarks. Such a table would not suit historical details. In these respects the author has left almost every thing to his biographers to do for him.
But, after all, the moving of mountains seems a liliputian task compared with what Herschel really did with those wonderful telescopes. He moved worlds, stars, a universe even, if you please, a galaxy of universes; at least he proved that they move, which seems scarcely less wonderful; and he expanded the cosmos, as man conceives it, to thousands of times the dimensions it had before.
His imagination was inspired by their contemplation; with ever-increasing enthusiasm he gazed on the revolving planets, on the flashing stars; he determined to fathom more profoundly the constellated depths. A larger instrument was necessary, and Herschel wrote to London for it; but the price demanded proved far beyond the resources of the sanguine organist. What should he do?
The first attempt of the kind was made by Sir William Herschel in 1801, and a very notable one it was. Meteorological statistics, save of the scantiest and most casual kind, did not then exist; but the price of corn from year to year was on record, and this, with full recognition of its inadequacy, he adopted as his criterion.
He was able, from his childhood, to devote himself almost exclusively to intellectual pursuits. William Herschel, in the early part of his career, had only been able to snatch occasional hours for study from his busy life as a professional musician.
My other works, such as the great treatise on Astronomical Delusions which Herschel and La Place afterward rendered unnecessary and the "History of the Dutch in America," never even progressed to this point of preparation.
"Who is it, then, that has made so much for the pleasure of knowing that it all amounts to nothing! The earth is dying Herschel says it is of cold; who holds in his hand the drop of condensed vapor and watches it as it dries up, as a fisher watches a grain of sand in his hand?
Brains always find open doors. Had she been rich or beautiful simply, Sir John Herschel, and Lady Herschell as well, would not have reached out both hands, and said, "You are always welcome at this house," and given her some of his own calculations? and some of his Aunt Caroline's writing.
And let me here observe, that Dr. Whewell, and in some degree even Sir John Herschel, seem to have misunderstood the meaning of those writers who, like M. Comté, limit the sphere of scientific investigation to Laws of Phenomena, and speak of the inquiry into causes as vain and futile. The causes which M. Comté designates as inaccessible, are efficient causes. Whewell’s.
It was the work of Herschel to discover that it was not a fixed star, but had a defined and distinct orbit that could be calculated. To look up at the heavens and pick out a star that could only be seen with a telescope pick it out of millions and ascertain its movement seems like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
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