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It brings into play every principle of constructive art, with the inexpressibly glorious reward of a more intimate acquaintance with the sublime wonders of the heavens, I communicated in full detail all my improvements in the art of casting, grinding, and polishing the specula of reflecting telescopes, to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, illustrating my paper with many drawings.
"I am much obliged to you for the beautiful drawing of the apparatus for grinding and polishing specula, invented by Mr. Lassell and constructed by yourself. I shall be glad to hear of your further progress in the construction of your telescope; and I trust that I shall have the pleasure of meeting you and Mr. Lassell at the Birmingham meeting of the British Association.
Halfway down the frail-seeming stem was a light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes minute they looked from above rotating slowly on the ring of its outer rail. These were the specula, en rapport with the wind-vane keeper's mirrors, in one of which Ostrog had shown him the coming of his rule.
The original improvers of telescopes would probably think, that as long as the size of the specula and the length of the tubes could be increased, the powers and advantages of the instrument would increase; but experience has since taught us, that the smallness of the field, the deficiency of light, and the circumstance of the atmosphere being magnified, prevent the beneficial results that were to be expected from telescopes of extraordinary size and power.
In constructing the seven-foot reflector, he finished no fewer than two hundred specula before he produced one that would bear any power that was applied to it, a striking instance of the persevering laboriousness of the man. While gauging the heavens with his instruments, he continued patiently to earn his bread by piping to the fashionable frequenters of the Pump-room.
His ardent desire to measure and gauge the stupendous array of worlds which his specula revealed to him, made him continually intent upon adding to their "space-penetrating power" by increasing their light-gathering surface. These, as he was the first to explain, are in a constant proportion one to the other.
On Wednesday, La Marmora came indeed, but in the ugly form of a bombardment; and that evening the Jenkins sat without lights about their drawing-room window, "watching the huge red flashes of the cannon" from the Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not without some awful pleasure, to the thunder of the cannonade.
O, Master Kilderkin, if you had but the just sense of the dignity of our profession, which is told of by the witty African slave, for so the king's most excellent Majesty designates him, Publius Terentius, Tanguam in specula in patinas inspicerejubeo."
By the employment of these simple and effective improvements in the art of casting the specula for reflecting telescopes, and also by the contrivance and employment of mechanical means for grinding and polishing them, I at length completed my first 8-inch diameter speculum, and mounted it according to the Newtonian plan.
A more powerful instrument was the first desideratum; and here his mechanical genius came to his aid. Having purchased the apparatus of a Quaker optician, he set about the manufacture of specula with a zeal which seemed to anticipate the wonders they were to disclose to him.
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