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Updated: May 14, 2025
And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his art is immortal. This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it, just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently waited for it.
Our Darwins, our Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays all the immense army of those that go down to nature with considering eye are steadfastly undermining and obliterating the superstitious past, literally burying it under endless loads of accumulated facts; and the printing-presses, like so many Argos, take these facts on their voyage round the world.
The Herschels concluded that "the stars of our firmament, instead of being scattered in all directions indifferently through space, form a stratum of which the thickness is small, in comparison with its length and breadth; and in which the earth occupies a place somewhere about the middle of its thickness, between the point where it subdivides into two principal laminæ inclined at a small angle to each other."
Thus, in early opportunities and educational advantages, the young Herschels certainly started in life far better equipped than most working men's sons; and, considering their father's doubtful position, it may seem at first sight rather a stretch of language to describe him as a working man at all.
The latter, in the hands of the two Herschels and Rosse, had reached its utmost limits as is shown by the fact that to this day the Rosse telescope is the largest of its kind in the world. Meanwhile the production of refracting telescopes made but slow progress. As late as 1836 the largest instrument of this kind in the world was the eleven-inch telescope of the observatory at Munich.
The two Herschels between them discovered some thousands of these close multiple systems; Struve and others increased the list to above ten thousand; and Mr. S. W. Burnham, of late years the most enthusiastic and successful of double-star pursuers, added a thousand new discoveries while he was still an amateur in astronomy, and by profession the stenographer of a Chicago court.
The southern half was almost virgin territory, for no other astronomer was possessed of a telescope of such power as those which the Herschels had used. It is true, of course, that as a certain margin of the southern hemisphere was visible from these latitudes, it had been more or less scrutinized by observers in northern skies.
The long and expensive lawsuits that resulted therefrom, but which they finally gained, would not deserve to be now exhumed; but having recently quoted Burke as one of the adversaries to our great mechanic, it appears only a just compensation here to mention that the Roys, Mylnes, Herschels, Delucs, Ramsdens, Robisons, Murdocks, Rennies, Cummings, Mores, Southerns, eagerly presented themselves before the magistrates to maintain the rights of persecuted genius.
Every month whole troops of Herschels and Wordsworths, and Humes and Gibbons, were presented to her by the great critic; and with a devout faith in all he told her, she listened enraptured to the praises of those astonishing geniuses, till she had begun to enter into Mr Bristles's own feelings of contempt for every body except the favoured few.
... We go to the Herschels' to-morrow, and there I shall finish this letter, as it is impossible to get it in time for Tuesday's post, but I have so much to do now that you must not expect a letter every post, and I had no time to begin this before, and I am too tired to sit up later to-night.... COLLINGWOOD, Monday.
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