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Updated: May 23, 2025
It had not taken into account the earth's rotation, whose force, according to Herschel, "gives at least one-half of their average momentum to all the winds which occur over the whole world;" nor the infinite variation in the movements of the atmosphere which we call winds, caused by the change in the sun's motion, by the differing amounts of vapor held in them, by the physical configuration of the earth below, by the vicinity of the sea or arid deserts, and by the passage of storms or electric currents.
The advantages that Herschel found in 1783, 1784, and 1785, in employing telescopes of twenty feet and with large apertures, made him wish to construct much larger still. The expense would be considerable; King George III. provided for it. The work, begun about the close of 1785, was finished in August, 1789.
Goethe in his 'Farbenlehre' thus describes the fluorescence of horse-chestnut bark: 'Let a strip of fresh horse-chestnut bark be taken and clipped into a glass of water; the most perfect sky-blue will be immediately produced. Sir John Herschel first noticed and described the fluorescence of the sulphate of quinine, and showed that the light proceeded from a thin stratum of the solution adjacent to the surface where the light enters it.
Soon after our arrival in London we became acquainted with the illustrious family of the Herschels, through the kindness of our friend Professor Wallace, for it was by his arrangement that we spent a day with Sir William and Lady Herschel, at Slough. Nothing could exceed the kindness of Sir William.
After the death of her illustrious brother, Miss Caroline retired to Hanover, to the house of Jahn Dietrich Herschel, a musician of high reputation, and the only surviving brother of the astronomer. William Herschel died without pain on the 23d of August 1822, aged eighty-three.
About 1835 a small treatise, translated from the New York American, related how Sir John Herschel, having been despatched to the Cape of Good Hope for the purpose of making there some astronomical calculations, had, by means of a telescope brought to perfection by means of internal lighting, reduced the apparent distance of the moon to eighty yards!
It gave form to a reaction against the sanguine views entertained by Hevelius, Schröter, Herschel and Gruithuisen as to the possibilities of agreeable residence on the moon, and relegated the "Selenites," one of whose cities Schröter thought he had discovered, and of whose festal processions Gruithuisen had not despaired of becoming a spectator, to the shadowy land of the Ivory Gate.
I beheld Jupiter and Saturn as they appear through our best telescopes, but still more magnified, all the moons and belts of Jupiter being perfectly distinct, and the double ring of Saturn appearing in that state in which I have heard Herschel often express a wish he could see it. It seemed as if I was on the verge of the solar system, and my moving sphere of light now appeared to pause.
A cool, dark, solid globe, its surface diversified with mountains and valleys, clothed in luxuriant vegetation, and "richly stored with inhabitants," protected by a heavy cloud-canopy from the intolerable glare of the upper luminous region, where the dazzling coruscations of a solar aurora some thousands of miles in depth evolved the stores of light and heat which vivify our world such was the central luminary which Herschel constructed with his wonted ingenuity, and described with his wonted eloquence.
The nebular hypothesis thus given detailed completion by Laplace is a worthy complement of the grand cosmologic scheme of Herschel. Whether true or false, the two conceptions stand as the final contributions of the eighteenth century to the history of man's ceaseless efforts to solve the mysteries of cosmic origin and cosmic structure.
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