Hanover to Sir John Herschel after his father's death. The authoress says, 'The information is of a very miscellaneous kind, but matters connected with her special study form the greater part of the questions' which, as we are elsewhere told, Miss Herschel used to put to her brother when they met at breakfast before separating for their daily task. We are then favoured with three or four interrogatories, which the writer of the 'Memoir' may, perhaps, consider likely to elicit information of a miscellaneous kind,' but which Miss Herschel in 1786 would have looked upon as absolutely childish. E.g., ‘Given the true time of the transit, take a transit? . . . . Of a logarithm given, to find the angle?' Now, in 1786 Miss Herschel had been fourteen years her brother's assistant. On the very same page where this absurd extract is given, there is an entry in Miss Herschel's journal :

4th. I calculated nebulæ all day, &c. .

9th. Calculated the places of 100 nebulæ.'

The lady who could make the two latter entries as records of her ordinary daily life would be little likely to ask for information as to the mode of taking a transit, or the way of finding an angle from its logarithm. It is obvious that the questions belong to the days when Miss Herschel first joined her brother at Bath, in 1772, when she was ignorant of almost everything except reading and writing. The Memoir' would be of little interest if it were not a record of difficulties overcome with immense rapidity by a very powerful mind. It is quite unfair to represent the Miss Herschel of 1786, who had already herself discovered a comet unassisted, and corresponded on equal terms with the leading astronomers of Europe, as asking childish questions of her brother. The questions are not worth noting at all; but if they are noted, they ought to be relegated to the first chapter as evidence of Miss Herschel's sincerity when she complained that she arrived in England absolutely ignorant of everything likely to be of use to her in the life that lay before her.

It is strange that we must go to a French philosopher for the record we possess of one of the most original thinkers who has appeared in this country. Except a few obituary notices in various periodicals, no biography of Sir William Herschel exists, except the short one by M. Arago prefixed to this Paper, and in this case the whole is comprised within a dozen pages of the little volume in which it appeared, and these are mostly devoted to an analysis of his work.

We propose to give such particulars respecting Sir William Herschel's

Herschel's life as may serve to appreciate the new light thrown upon his character by the journals and letters of his sister. But it is evident that the authoress of the Memoir' has materials at her disposal much more ample than any to which persons beyond her family-circle can have access; and we cannot but wish that she had herself performed the task. If the present volume were at some future time remodelled, so as to include the life of Sir William Herschel as well as that of his sister, it would fill a blank much felt by those interested in the history of astronomy. Although it is acknowledged that Sir William Herschel occupies the second place among English astronomers, it is not likely that he will become the subject of a separate biography. We think this, partly from the nature of his work, and partly from the character of his life. He wrote nothing but papers for learned societies, and his communications to learned societies were hardly more than transcripts of entries in the inexhaustible observation-book at Slough. The work he produced was new, but, from its very novelty, imperfect. Sir William Herschel was obliged to invent the instruments and fashion the materials he used. His object was more to traverse a large field of observation than to strive after minute details. He knew that his inventions would be improved upon, and the imperfections of his work be corrected, but he had taken possession of a domain in science opened out by himself, and full of wonders absolutely new; he was eager to push his daring investigations deeper and yet deeper in the abyss whose marvels had never been seen by the eye of any mortal man till they were unveiled to him. To linger on such a road longer than was absolutely necessary would have been for him waste of time; to dwell on trifles would have been but labour lost; and he was too good a mechanic to force effort beyond the point at which it ceased to be effectual. It is in astronomy as in another field of exploration. The footsteps of the pioneer-settler in a new land are soon effaced by the tread of his successors. They settle, flourish, improve on the spot which he painfully toiled to attain. But though he has laboured, and others have entered into his labour, to the pioneer belongs the honour and the fame. So it is with William Herschel. Sir John Herschel traversed the whole field opened by his father, besides a new one of his own. He worked on his father's lines with appliances such as had not been within his father's reach. He attained a degree of precision to which the elder astronomer laid no claim. The contrast between the father and son was such as might have been anticipated from their training. The father, untrained, or, rather, self-trained in mathematics, invented methods and pursued

science

science as the passion of his life; but until he reached middle age his devotion to astronomy was indulged at the expense of his regular avocations, and as a relief from regular business. If one may venture to speak of such a consummate observer as a roughand-ready astronomer, the expression is only used as contrasting him with his son. Sir John, born under the shadow of the forty-foot telescope,' was trained for an astronomer from his earliest youth. By rare good fortune, the gifts of nature enabled him to avail himself of the opportunities to which he was born. Senior Wrangler of his year-a year in which the great calculator Babbage went out without even competing for the first place, Sir John developed into the first mathematician of his day. His father had learnt mathematics that he might understand astronomy; the son was carefully trained to them from a boy, and passed a long life polishing the delicate weapons which had been put into his hands. No wonder that, revising Sir William Herschel's calculations, he should have superseded his father's labours, but without diminishing his father's fame. Another reason is that Sir William Herschel's writings, spread over more than forty years, are all disconnected-they are the mere transcript of the work on which he was for the moment occupied. They have never been collected, but remain scattered over more than forty volumes of the Philosophical Transactions.' His life affords but few incidents for the biographer. From the time when he first gave himself up to astronomy until his death, he hardly ever absented himself for more than a few days from his telescopes. The record of his life is the record of his work. Apart from the result of his scientific inquiries, the most industrious biographer would not be able to put together the materials for a moderate-sized volume. How much the greater, then, is the regret that the present opportunity has been allowed to escape!

Though M. Arago's analysis of Herschel's labours is short, it is most valuable, and it is pleasant to find ourselves under such good guidance. As a biographer we follow him with distrust; for, to say the truth, M. Arago exhibits that recklessness of foreign geography and nomenclature which even highlyeducated Frenchmen sometimes permit themselves to indulge. His first page contains two random shots of this kind: he says 'Abraham Herschel . . . demeurait à Mähren, d'où il fut expulsé,' &c., apparently unaware that Mähren is not a town, but the German name for Moravia. Moreover, it was not Abraham Herschel, but Hans, his father, who was driven from his home. We should not have thought it worth while to criticise M. Arago's geography, or the genealogy which he gives of the Herschel

Herschel family, were it not that others have followed him in the further mistake of asserting that Jacob Herschel was the father of William and Caroline. Jacob Herschel was an elder brother of Sir William, and at the time of the latter's birth in 1738 was a child of four years old.

The family of whom William and Caroline Herschel were members all showed remarkable talent at an early age. Their father was an excellent musician, and he trained all his children to follow his own profession. Each of them, when they attained the age of two years, went to the Hanoverian garrison school, and there William soon outstripped his brothers, and at last caused the schoolmaster to acknowledge that the boy had got beyond him. By the time he was fourteen William was a good performer on the oboe and the violin, and had learned all the schoolmaster could teach of French and mathematics. Caroline never had much schooling. Her mother considered learning unnecessary for a woman, and preferred to keep her daughter closely employed in household work to allowing her time for mental cultivation. The consequence of this prejudice was that she grew up almost to womanhood without possessing more than the merest rudiments of knowledge. She could read and write, but that was all. It was not till many years afterwards, when she was with her brother William in England, that she began to learn arithmetic. This brings into still stronger relief the native shrewdness which enabled Miss Herschel to pick up, in the midst of other avocations, accomplishments such as distinguished her later life.

For many years before Caroline Herschel's birth, her father's constitution had been impaired by the hardships of war. After the Battle of Dettingen, where King George II. of England, at the head of an army of English, Hanoverians, and Hessians, drove the French, under De Noailles, across the Main, the unfortunate bandmaster of the Royal Guard lay all night in a wet furrow, and in consequence contracted an asthmatic affection which embittered the whole remainder of his life. But he still

remained in the army. Among the earliest of Caroline Herschel's recollections is the sight of the confirmation of her brother William, on which occasion he wore his new Oboësten uniform,' for he, as well as his elder brother Jacob had joined their father as musicians in the band of the Guard. They were, indeed, a family of musicians, for the elder daughter married another bandsman in the same regiment, named Griesbach. Miss Herschel records that her father never much approved of the match, for the somewhat quaint reason that Griesbach was but an indifferent musician.

Alexander

Alexander Herschel, the eldest of the sons, was, though not a soldier, a most accomplished musician: indeed, when William and Caroline deserted music for astronomy in later years, Alexander still adhered to his first profession, though he had a large share of his distinguished brother's mechanical ingenuity, and became an efficient maker of mathematical and optical instruments for his observatory.

When Caroline was about five years old the home in Hanover was broken up, and, as events turned out, it was never afterwards entirely reunited. The Guard was ordered to England, and Isaac Herschel, with his two sons and his son-in-law, accompanied it. Mrs. Herschel kept house as well as she could, with much straitened means; but the family circumstances were not improved by the arrival of Mrs. Griesbach, the married daughter, whose husband marched with the rest, but forgot to leave any part of his pay for the support of his wife.

Even at that time the characteristic genius of William Herschel had begun to show itself. His talk was of the discoveries and theories of Newton, Leibnitz, and Euler; his recreation the invention and fashioning of scientific instruments, in which he was assisted by his brother Alexander. After a year's absence the regiment returned, and it is recorded that William's sole purchase brought from England was a copy of Locke on the Human Understanding.' Jacob, his brother, a much less amiable character, who seems always to have been regarded with feelings akin to terror in the Herschel household, threw up his appointment in the band, in consequence of a slight which he considered himself to have suffered, by the appointment of another musician to a post he coveted. He appeared in Hanover in smart English clothes to set his mother's household by the ears, while his father and brother accompanied their regiment on its homeward march.

William Herschel was the next to leave the band of the Guard, and, however sincerely we may rejoice at an event which left that great man free to become an astronomer and an Englishman, it must be confessed that he did not stand on the order of his going, or waste his time in preliminaries. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1756 the Guard was of course engaged, and the bandmaster, with his son William, marched among the rest. The Guard was attached to the ill-starred force under the Duke of Cumberland, when Marshal d'Estrées was directed, with 60,000 Frenchmen, first against the Prussian dominions lying on the Rhine, and next against Hanover itself: the British and Hanoverian army, ill-led and outmatched, was at last subjected by d'Estrées to a disastrous defeat at Hartenbeck, on the Weser.

The