William Herschel was born at Hanover, November 15, 1738. His father was a musician, and brought up his four sons to his own art, which in Germany gave him better means of educating his children, than would have fallen to the lot of a person holding the same station in England. The subject of our memoir is said to have had a master who instructed him in French, ethics, and metaphysics: but at the age of fourteen he was placed in the band of the Hanoverian regiment of guards, and in 1758 or 1759 he accompanied a detachment of the regiment to England. Another account states that he grew tired of his occupation, and came to England alone. Here, after struggling with poverty for some time, he was chosen by Lord Darlington to organize a band for the Durham militia; after which he passed several years in the West Riding of Yorkshire, employed in teaching music and studying languages. About 1765 he was elected organist at Halifax, and employed himself in the study of harmony and mathematics. Such at least is the statement of the ‘Obituary;’ but in that respectable work we find no references to the sources from which these minute particulars of Herschel’s early life are obtained. About this time he is said to have visited Italy; and, without professing to give credit to it, we may here insert a curious story which appears to have been copied into English works from the ‘Dictionnaire des Auteurs Vivans,’ &c., Paris, 1816. Being at Genoa, and not having wherewith to pay his passage home to England, he procured from a M. L’AnglÉ the use of some public rooms for a concert, at which he played a quartett, alone, upon a harp, and two horns, one fastened to each shoulder. Those who are in the least acquainted with wind instruments will hardly believe that a horn fastened to the shoulder would be of much more use than one growing out of the head, as a musical instrument; to say nothing of the difficulty of blowing two horns at once, or of playing a quartett upon three instruments. Remarkable characters are generally made the subject of wonderful stories, of which each is fashioned in accordance with the general habits of the inventor: the groom’s idea of a wit was “a gentleman who could ride three horses at once;” surely two horns and a harp are not too much to be played at once by a planetary discoverer.

About 1766, he is said to have been one of the Pump-room band at Bath, and was shortly afterwards organist of the Octagon Chapel there. He taught and read as before; and here he turned his attention to astronomy. He borrowed a small reflecting telescope of a friend; and at length, finding that the purchase of such an instrument was (“fortunately,” as it has been well expressed,) above his means, he endeavoured to construct one for himself. His first attempt was a five-feet Newtonian reflector. It was some time before he perfected himself in the method of forming mirrors: in one instance he is said to have spoiled 200 before he succeeded.

In 1781, he announced to the world the discovery of his new planet, of which we shall presently speak. He was immediately appointed private astronomer to the King, by George III., a post which, we believe, was created for him, and died with him, with a salary of £400, and removed, first to Datchet, afterwards to Slough, where he continued till his death, August 23, 1822. During this period he ran that career of patient and sagacious investigation, terminating in brilliant discovery, which has made his name so well known to the world. Little has been published concerning his private life; but the whole results of his mind are to be found in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ between the years 1782 and 1818.

We have not been able to find the dates of his knighthood, or of his receiving the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. He married (we cannot find the date) Mrs. Mary Pitt, a widow; and his only son, Sir John Herschel, has selected from the many tasks to which he is competent, that of developing and adding to his father’s discoveries.

In the space which we can devote to the astronomical and optical labours of Herschel, we cannot attempt to furnish even the smallest detail of their end and objects, since the catalogue of titles alone would occupy more room than we have to give. We can do no more than address ourselves to the impression which generally exists upon the subject, and which supposes the inventor and the philosopher to be no more than an industrious man with good eyes, clever at grinding mirrors for reflecting telescopes, and lucky enough to point one at a new planet. Such being the common notion, it is not possible to make any mere description of Herschel’s papers an index of his merits. Nor have we here understated the scientific knowledge of the public in general. When Sir John Herschel lately set out for the Cape of Good Hope, the newspapers announced his approaching departure, accompanied by the information that “six waggon loads of telescopes” were on their way to the ship, which was all that was said, except in publications expressly scientific. That one principal object of the son’s voyage was to complete a great branch of astronomy, by doing in the southern hemisphere what the father had done in the northern, was not stated for a very simple reason—that this portion of the father’s labours is hardly known by name to any but astronomers. And it is to astronomers only that Herschel is truly known. The notion entertained of him by others often reminds us of the farmer, who came to him to know the proper time to cut his hay. The philosopher replied by pointing to his own crop, which happened to be rotting on the ground under a heavy rain.

The planet which Herschel called after George III. (but which now goes under the more appropriate name of Uranus) was discovered by him March 13, 1781; not accidentally, but as one of the fruits of a laborious investigation, with a distinct and useful object. He was examining every star with one telescope, that he might obtain a definite idea of relative phenomena, which should enable him to distinguish changes actually taking place, from differences of appearance caused by the use of different telescopes: the whole being in furtherance of the design of “throwing some new light upon the organization of the celestial bodies.” The last words, which are part of the title of one of his subsequent papers, aptly express the line of astronomy to which Herschel devoted his life; and the discovery of the planet Uranus was not the chance work of a moment, but the consequence of sagacity strengthened by habit, the latter being formed with a perfect knowledge of what was wanted, as well as of what would be useful in supplying it. Had he been merely registering the places of the stars, he would probably (as others did before him) have passed the planet, perhaps with some remark upon its apparent diskiness: for though the stars have no well-defined discs, yet some have so much more of the appearance of discs than others, that a faint planet, viewed with a low power, might easily be taken for a star. But being engaged upon the stars, expressly with a view to trying how much of such a circumstance would be telescopic, and how much real, he was thereby led to try higher powers, and, eventually, other telescopes. The existence of the planet was soon ascertained, and forms one of the two great features of Herschel’s reputation in the eyes of the world at large.

The celebrated forty-foot telescope, first described to the Royal Society by Herschel, June 2, 1795, was the result of a long series of experiments on the construction of mirrors, begun at Bath, on telescopes from two to twenty feet in length. And we may here remark, that “the bulk of his fortune arose from the sale of telescopes of his own construction, many of which were purchased for the chief observatories of Europe,” and not from the salary of £400 a year which he received as private astronomer to George III. See ‘Statement of Circumstances,’ &c., a pamphlet printed on the occasion of the last election of a President by the Royal Society. In 1785, George III. furnished Herschel with the means of undertaking an instrument larger than any he had yet made. The greatest difficulty (independent of the stand) was the obtaining a mirror of sufficient size, which should not crack in cooling, and should be strong enough not to bend under its own weight. This instrument has been so frequently described that we shall say no more of it, except that Herschel dates the completion of it from August 28, 1789, when he discovered the sixth satellite of Saturn, and obtained his best view of the spots on that planet. A month later, the seventh satellite was discovered by Herschel. This telescope is now never used. Sir J. Herschel prefers a twenty-foot reflector for his own observations.

The first discovery of the satellites of Uranus was also in a minor degree the work of thought. Such bodies were repeatedly looked for by Herschel, but none were seen. A small change in the instrument, by which the light was increased, suggested one more trial; and the result was the establishment of the existence of the two first satellites, in January, 1787. Two more were discovered by Herschel, in 1790, and two more in 1794. These satellites cannot be seen but with an instrument of first-rate power, and in a favourable position of the planet. No one has observed the four last satellites except Herschel himself, or the two first, except himself and Sir J. Herschel, who has confirmed his father’s determination of their periods. See Mem. Royal Astron. Soc. vol. viii. He found that their orbits were nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, and ascertained their retrograde motion, and some remarkable relations between their mean distances. It has a brilliant sound, but it is literally true as to the number of known bodies composing the solar system, that Herschel left it exactly half as large again as he found it. To the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter and four satellites, Saturn and five satellites, and Halley’s Comet, eighteen in all, he added nine, namely, two satellites to Saturn, Uranus and six satellites.

But not content with augmenting our own, it is to Herschel we owe the discovery of other systems. That the fixed stars were each the centre of a number of planets was suspected, perhaps rather prematurely, before his observations were made known. But the first positive addition to our knowledge of systems, that is of bodies which move in any degree of connexion with each other, is to be found in his paper read to the Royal Society, June 9, 1803, announcing that Castor, ? Leonis, e Bootis, ? Herculis, d Serpentis, ? Virginis, were most probably binary^[4] stars. The existence of such systems has been confirmed by Sir J. Herschel and Professor Struve, and the duration of the periods given by Herschel has been sufficiently confirmed to make the exactness of his observations remarkable. But to new planets, and new systems, Herschel added new universes; or, more properly speaking, showed that the universe consisted of portions, each conveying as large an idea of extent and number, as the whole of what was previously called the universe. His great telescope furnished sufficient facts, and his mind was not slow to draw a conjectural inference, which must be classed among the happiest efforts of reasoning speculation. The resolution of the milky way into stars proved that we are situated in a stratum of such bodies much thicker in some directions than others: this led to the inference that some or all of the nebulÆ with which the sky is crowded might be similar enormous groups of stars; and the resolution of some of the nebulÆ into detached portions was a first step towards the demonstration of the conjecture.

There is enough yet unmentioned,—in the discovery of the time of rotation of Saturn—that of Jupiter’s satellites—that of the refrangibility of heat—the experiments on colours—the enormous collection of nebulÆ—the experimental determination of the magnitude of stars—the researches and conjectures on the physical constitution of the sun—those on the qualities of telescopes, &c. &c.,—to form by itself no ordinary title to the recollection of posterity. But we must refer to Sir J. Herschel’s Astronomy, in which will be found such an account of them as the plan of the work permitted, by one who has shown himself as indisposed to exaggerate, as interested to explain.

In the labours of his observatory Herschel was assisted by his sister, Miss Caroline Herschel, with whose help he published, in 1798, his catalogue of Flamsteed’s stars. This lady, whose exertions, both as an observer and calculator, are well known to astronomers, is still living, at a very advanced age, in Hanover.

We do not know of any very trustworthy account of Herschel. ‘The Obituary for 1822,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ the ‘Annual Register,’ &c., do not state their authorities. We have followed the first-mentioned work as to facts and dates in most of the particulars here mentioned.