MEMOIR OF SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL.

BY N. S. Dodge,

About the year 1760, as Dr. Miller, the organist, better known, perhaps, as the historian of Doncaster, England, was dining at Pontefract with the officers of the Durham militia, one of them told him that they had a young German in their band who was an excellent performer on the violin, and if he would step into another room he might judge for himself. The invitation was gladly accepted, and Miller heard a solo of Giardini's executed in a manner that surprised him. Learning afterward that the engagement of the young musician was only from month to month, he invited him to leave the band and come and live with him. "I am a single man," he said, "and we doubtless shall be happy together; beside, your merit will soon entitle you to a more eligible situation." The offer was accepted as frankly as it was made; and the satisfaction with which the old organist always plumed himself upon this act of generous feeling is not surprising, since the German hautboyplayer turned out at last to be Herschel the astronomer.

The Jew Snetzler, a famous organ-builder a hundred years and more ago, was at this time setting up a new organ for the parish church of Halifax. Herschel, at Dr. Miller's advice, became one of the seven candidates for the place of organist. They drew lots how they were to perform in succession. Herschel drew the third. The second fell to Dr. Wainwright, of Manchester, whose rapid execution astonished the judges. "I was standing in the middle aisle with Herschel," wrote Dr. Miller, "and I said to him, 'What chance have you to follow this man?' He replied, 'I don't know; I am sure fingers will not do.' He ascended the organ-loft, however, and produced from the instrument so uncommon a fullness, such a volume of slow, solemn harmony, that I could not account for the effect. After a short extempore effusion, he finished with the old Hundredth Psalm tune, which he played better than his opponent. Ay, ay,' cried old Snetzler, 'tish is very goot; I vill luf tish man, for he gives my piphes room for to spheak." Having afterward asked Mr. Herschel by what means he produced so uncommon an effect, he replied, "I told you fingers would not do ;" and taking two pieces of lead from his pocket, "One of these," he said, "I placed on the lowest key of the organ and the other on the octave above; thus, by accommo dating the harmony, I produced the effect of four hands instead of two.” In 1780, twenty years after this, when Miller talked of his friend Herschel's great fame, and of his sister, Caroline Herschel, who, when her brother was asleep, amused herself in sweeping the sky with his twenty

feet reflector and searching for comets, the kind-hearted old man used to wish that the science of acoustics had been advanced in the same degree as the science of optics, "For," he said, "had William constructed auditory tubes of proportionate power to his great telescope, who knows but we might have been enabled to hear the music of the spheres!" From this date, fourscore and twelve years ago, until the present time, no name among modern scientific men has attained a higher rank than that of Herschel. Ninety volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society have been enriched with papers bearing the wellknown signature. Genius, though often hereditary, is quite as often wayward. It not unfrequently skips a generation. It descends sometimes to daughters. It reappears in other cases, after being dormant in children and grandchildren, in a fourth or fifth step of descent. But with the two Herschels the transmission was immediate. The original circumstances of the two great philosophers were indeed widely different. Sir William, the father, by genius and application succeeded in rising from obscurity to the proud position of the first astronomer of the age. His son, Sir John Herschel, had the advantage of the highest university training. But both were gifted with extraordinary talents, keen scientific tastes, and those great mathematical powers which so materially assist in abstruse inquiries. In the case of the subject of this memoir, the combination of high education with an extraordinary natural talent for communicating his thoughts in an attractive manner, has been one of the means of making him the most distinguished philosopher of the nineteenth century.

John Frederick William Herschel was born at Slough, March 7, 1792. His father was already famous. People came from distant lands to see the great telescope. There are traditions about the wonder with which mail-travelers used to stare, in passing, at the mechanism by which the monster tube was used. A thousand stories of its revelations passed current among the vulgar. The astronomer let nobody use his forty-foot telescope, but the fame of it could not be hidden. It went through all the civilized world. And it was under the shadow of that mysterious erection that this only child of the house-born when his father, then of twoscore and twelve years, was absorbed alike in the fame he had achieved and the wonders he was every night discovering; reared in infancy with an uncle who spent his days in adjusting instruments, and an aunt whose nights were devoted to discovering new comets in the heavens; without a boy's associations and playmates, in a house kept quiet all the day that the star-watchers might sleep; and wandering through rooms whose silence no sports were permitted to disturb and no youthful buoyancy to interrupt-it was here that he passed his boyhood. Twelve years before the boy's birth the "Observations of the periodical star Mira Ceti," read before the Royal Society, had establishéd his father's position among scientific men, and one year later his discovery of Uranus brought him into the foremost rank of astronomical observers.

Amid such a childhood, separated from boys of his own age, suppressed in every demonstration which youthful spirits naturally give to feeling, without the school antagonisms that teach a lad his real worth, or the school rivalries that lead him to rate his fellow according to the plucky boyhood he exhibits, at the form or on the play-ground, in the dormitory or at the sparring-match, it is strange that the boy did not grow up full of eccentricities. His detractors-and even he, the gentlest of men, was not without them-say that he did. But there was in him, from first to last, no lack of manliness, no insincerity, no jealousy, no indifference even to rival merit. And then the man's life-long and conspicuous veneration for his father is perhaps the best proof of a happy childhood and youth. No want pinched the household; warm affection existed between the parents; the boy was the idol of a fond aunt and a fonder uncle; and it must have been from a happy home that he went to Eton.

At the usual period of life young Herschel entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he graduated B. A. in 1813, as senior wrangler, having for his competitors the late Dr. Peacock, Dean of Ely, who was second wrangler, and the late Rev. Fearon Fallows, formerly astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, as third wrangler. The names of several other men of mark appear in the honor-list as contemporary students, such as Professor Mill, Dr. Robinson, Master of the Temple, and Bishop Carr, of Bombay. Mr. Herschel had no sooner attained his degree than he forwarded a mathematical paper to the Royal Society, "On a remarkable application of Cotes's Theorem." This was published in the Philosophical Transactions. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and though barely past his majority became at once an active member.

The early researches of Herschel were confined to pure mathematics. For papers on this subject, published in the Philosophical Transactions, the Copley medal was awarded him in 1821. In 1822 he turned his attention to "observing" astronomy, that practical branch which descended to him as a hereditary duty. This occupation led him to associate with others in forming a special society for the general advancement of astronomical science. A few years previous to the death of his father, in consequence of the improvement in astronomical telescopes, amateur observers sprang up, who took great interest in the delineation of the heavens. It was considered an epoch favorable to the formation of a body that should be exclusively devoted to the encouragement of astronomy; and Mr. Herschel drew up an address which forms the first publication of the present Royal Astronomical Society.

All the while, however, the imagination of the young philosopher was dwelling on the last discovery of his father-the binary stars. It was a secret, won from the unknown, that opened a new view into the universe. The boy was scarcely in adolescence, the father passing into old age, when the constitution of the nebula was an

nounced. It was the great achievment of the one; it was the first dictate to the young manhood of the other. Three years of conversation and thought passed away, when the son, then twenty-four, took from his father, then seventy-eight, the work of examining the double stars. The old man's end of life was gained. What of nobility was in him had descended right royally. In the space of five years the young astronomer had mapped 380 double and triple stars, obtained by above 10,000 separate measurements. The record of these observations was acknowledged by the French Academy of Sciences in bestowing their astronomical medal, and followed by a similar reward in England. This occurred in 1824. The old astronomer had foreseen the honors which his son would win, but did not live to rejoice in them. Sir William had died two years before. With his death came great changes to the pleasant family at Slough. The good mother survived, indeed, but the strange, ancient household was broken up. The aunt, who had watched the clock and catalogued the stars up to the last, returned to her old home in Germany. The cheerful old uncle had desisted from mechanical adjustments only when apoplexy felled him at his work, and the young inheritor of all the honors was left to perform his task alone.

To those who have had no experience in continuous astronomical observations there can be no conception of its anxious toil. Money cannot repay it, nor honors, nor fame. In the pursuit day must be turned into night, society abandoned, the round of home comforts broken in upon, intercourse with friends and neighbors discontinued; and the astronomical observer, quitting all the amenities of life, finds his compensation in the brotherhood of the stars. This self-sacrifice young Herschel made. The objects to observe required a calm atmosphere. The best time for this is between midnight and sun-rise. This continuous night-work requires health. Herschel felt the severity of it. "Should I be fortunate enough," he writes, when he was but thirty years old, "to bring this work to a conclusion, I shall then joyfully yield up a subject on which I have bestowed a large portion of my time, and expended much of my health and strength, to others who will hereafter, by the aid of those masterpieces of workmanship which modern art places at their disposal, pursue with comparative ease and convenience. an inquiry which has presented to myself difficulties such as at one period had almost compelled me to abandon it in despair.”

In 1831 Mr. Herschel received the honor of knighthood from the hands of King William, in acknowledgment of his eminent scientific services.

In 1833 he was awarded the royal medal of the Royal Society for his paper "On the investigation of the orbits of revolving double stars." The Duke of Sussex then said of him," Sir John Herschel has devoted himself for many years, as much from filial piety, perhaps, as from inclination, to the examination of those remote regions of the universe into which his illustrious father first penetrated, and which he trans

mitted to his son as a hereditary possession, with which the name of Herschel must be associated for all ages. He has subjected the whole sphere of the heavens within his observation to a repeated and systematic scrutiny. He has determined the position and described the character of the most remarkable of the nebula. He has observed and registered many thousand distances and angles of position of double stars, and has shown, from comparison of his own with other observations, that many of them form systems whose variations of position are subject to invariable laws. He has succeeded, by a happy combination of graphical construction with numerical calculations, in determining the relative elements of the orbits which some of them describe round each other, and in forming tables of their motions; and he has thus demonstrated that the laws of gravitation, which are exhibited, as it were, in miniature in our own planetary system, prevail also in the most distant regions of space-a memorable conclusion, justly entitled, by the generality of its character, to be considered as forming an epoch in the history of astronomy, and presenting one of the most magnificent examples of the simplicity and universality of those fundamental laws of nature by which their great Author has shown that he is the same to day and forever, here and everywhere."

It is impossible to give any analysis of the results of the numerous researches which occupied the time of Sir John Herschel at the various periods of his life. From a rough and evidently incomplete list of his papers it would appear that out of seventy, twenty-eight are on astronomical subjects, thirteen on optics, ten on pure mathematics, eight on geology, and eleven on miscellaneous science.

There are, however, two of his astronomical works to which we may fittingly refer here, since they furnish a key which unlocks much of Sir John's personal history. These are, first, his "Catalogue of nebulæ and clusters," published in the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1833, for which the gold medals of the Royal Society and the Astronomical Society were awarded; and, second, "Results deduced from observations made at the Cape of Good Hope." For this latter work he received the Copley medal for the second time from the Royal Society, and an honorary testimonial from the Astronomical Society.

The interest which Sir John Herschel always exhibited in the minute details of nebulæ and double stars must be considered as the result of his association with his illustrious father. M. Arago, in his admirable and exhaustive biographical notice of Sir William Herschel, translated from the French, and published recently in the report of the Smithsonian Institution, refers gracefully to this fact. Sir John's early familiarity with his father's instruments, in familiarity with which he may be said to have grown up, and with their necessary use in making observations, had its influence doubtless in the same direction. Hence, probably, the reason why so long a period of his observing time was devoted to this section of astronomical research. One of his first communications to the