Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

disseminated the most violent opinions in politics and religion. His design is not the less subtle and dangerous, because, in accomplishing this object, he has ingeniously perverted facts, and in the ardour of his temperament has misrepresented the conduct and motives of men; of those especially who have upheld the Church and the Monarchy. His sympathies are not with order, but with disorder; not with established Government, but with those who have attempted to overthrow it. In the most ardent and furious of the leaders of the French Revolution he finds a real nobleness of aim and temper'* which he denies to the champions of good government, or the peaceful upholders of religion and morality. To him the aristocracy, in conjunction with the Monarchy, are the plagues of mankind, united in a dire conspiracy against popular freedom, progress, and development. Is this a history, we ask, to be put into the hands of the young and incautious? Is it from this they are to learn wisdom and moderation, to form just and equitable judgments of past events, or of the great actors of times that are gone? Is this the teaching by which they are to estimate rightly the deeds of kings, the worth of an aristocracy, the beneficial effects of order and religion? We think not. We have warned our readers against the errors and tendencies of Mr. Green's book. It is for them to exercise the necessary precautions, both for themselves and for those who are committed to their care and guidance.

ART. II.-1. Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel. By Mrs. John Herschel. London, 1876.

2. Analyse historique et critique de la Vie et des Travaux de Sir William Herschel. Par M. Arago. Paris, in the 'Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes' for 1842.

N the early part of the seventeenth century there was a great

[ocr errors]

who fled from their homes during the evil days were three brothers, named Herschel, who became possessed of land in Saxony, and settled there. One of the brothers established himself as a brewer at Pirna, near Dresden. Abraham Herschel, the son of the Pirna brewer, was landscape-gardener to the King, and obtained considerable reputation by his skill and taste in his profession. Isaac Herschel, Abraham's third and youngest son, was born in 1707. Declining to follow the profession of a

* Short History,' p. 778.

gardener,

gardener, to which he was destined, the young man resolved to devote himself to music, and became a hautboy-player in the Hanoverian Royal Guard. At an early age Isaac married, and settled in Hanover, where he had a large family, two of which were William-afterwards the great astronomer, whose name is so familiar to English ears-and Caroline, the subject of the present memoir.

The fame of Sir William Herschel as an astronomer is perhaps second only to that of Sir Isaac Newton; but few are aware how greatly he was indebted to his sister. For forty years, from the time when he first commenced his career of astronomical discovery until the grave closed over him, Caroline Herschel never quitted him. She was his trusted assistant; it was she who performed the vast and complicated numerical calculations that made his observations available to science; she was his amanuensis, and, till he married late in life, his housekeeper. It was she who converted his rough notes into lucid papers to be read before learned societies; she did for him an amount of labour which filled those who were in the secret with amazement; she served him with a great and unwearied love, content to stand aside and claim no share in the credit of all the great works he performed. It is hard to find a parallel to the entire self-abnegation with which she gave up all the energies of her mind and body to him.

The volume now before us brings the life of this very remarkable lady for the first time before the general reader. It is in many respects extremely entertaining; it is full of racy extracts from her letters and journals. We make acquaintance with a very original mind; we learn to admire a very warm-hearted woman, full of prejudices and oddities, but with an absence of selfishness as charming as it is uncommon. But we cannot help regretting that the authoress did not extend her plan, and that the opportunity has been lost of making us better acquainted with Sir William Herschel. No life of that great astronomer has been written, and we should have been well pleased if the publication of the present memoir had been made the occasion of remedying the defect. It would have been easy for the authoress to satisfy the not ungraceful curiosity of the world respecting the life of her distinguished ancestor; but the memoir adds but little to our knowledge of him. Those who are acquainted with the scattered notices of his life may sometimes see, in a chance phrase of Miss Herschel, the correction of a mistake, or a hint which may make clear some hitherto doubtful point; and to those who know Sir William Herschel's work, the present volume is like a personal introduction to the workman. But the

general

general reader cannot fairly be expected to possess this knowledge. Nowhere throughout the book are we told the meaning of the astronomical activity in which the brother and sister passed their lives. We cannot be expected to care much about mere hard work apart from sympathy with its object; and even intellectual toil is uninteresting unless we are allowed to share the hopes and fears of the labourers. We hear of Sir William Herschel grinding for sixteen hours at a stretch at one of his telescope mirrors, and of Miss Herschel reading to him as he works, and putting food into his mouth by bits, while he continues his monotonous labour without removing his hands ; but the anecdote is unmeaning unless we know why he toiled so hard: a railway signal-man sometimes works even longer without creating any public enthusiasm. The real interest of the incident lies in this: that Sir William Herschel had conceived the idea of a new form of telescope, and was labouring with almost frenzied energy to put it into execution, that the plan succeeded so well as to revolutionise all previous methods of making reflecting telescopes, and laid the foundations of modern Stellar astronomy. This is the kernel; the 'Memoir' gives us but the shell. Again, throughout the book we have not a hint as to the boundary of Herschel's peculiar province in astronomy; in what condition he found the science; wherein he improved it; what object he proposed to himself; and how far that object was attained. It seems to us that the life of his faithful assistant, who shared all his labours and all his hopes, cannot be intelligently told without at the same time telling us this. We may be made to admire the energetic woman; but Miss Herschel would have felt anything but pleased if any one had admired in her the woman, at the expense of the astronomer.

The authoress sometimes does less than justice to the gifted lady who is the subject of her book. During her life, as her brother's assistant, he was, of course, commanding officer; his was the invention, the genius, the rapid intuition, and, most properly, the lion's share of fame. To her lot fell the duty of patient attention; hers was the labour of calculation; the arrangement and transcription of rough notes. Mathematical analysis belonged to him; arithmetical computations were handed over to her. But to carry out his instructions and to perform the tasks assigned to her required a large range of knowledge, as well as indomitable perseverance. It is therefore not fair to the memory of Miss Herschel to make it appear that she was profoundly ignorant of even rudimentary mathematics. To give an instance: an extract is given in the memoir, under the date 1786, from a MS. book belonging to Miss Herschel, and sent by her from Hanover

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

« AnteriorContinua »