SIR JOHN HERSCHEL AT CAMBRIDGE AND SLOUGH.
“The little boy is entertaining, comical, and promising,” Dr. Burney
wrote after his visit to Slough in 1797. John Frederick William
Herschel was then five years old, having been born “within the shadow
of the great telescope” March 7, 1792. He was an industrious little
fellow, especially in doing mischief. “When one day I was sitting
beside him,” his aunt relates, “listening to his prattle, my attention
was drawn by his hammering to see what he might be about, and I found
that it was the continuation of many days’ labour, and that the ground
about the corner of the house was undermined, the corner-stone entirely
away, and he was hard at work going on with the next. I gave the alarm,
and old John Wiltshire, a favourite carpenter, came running, crying
out, ‘God bless the boy, if he is not going to pull the house down!’”
And she wrote to him at Feldhausen; “I see you now in idea, running
about in petticoats among your father’s carpenters, working with little
tools of your own, and John Wiltshire crying out, ‘Dang the boy, if he
can’t drive in a nail as well as I can!’”
[Illustration: SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL, BART.
(_From a portrait painted by Pickersgill for St. John’s College,
Cambridge._)]
“John and I,” she told his wife, “were the most affectionate friends,
and many a half or whole holiday spent with me was dedicated to making
experiments in chemistry, in which generally all boxes, tops of
tea-canisters, pepper-boxes, teacups, etc., served for the necessary
vessels, and the sand-tub furnished the matter to be analysed. I only
had to take care to exclude water, which would have produced havoc on
my carpet.”
From a preparatory school kept by Dr. Gretton at Hitcham, he was sent,
a delicate, blue-eyed lad, to Eton. His mother, however, happening to
see him maltreated by a stronger boy, brought him home after a few
months, and his education was continued by a Scotch mathematician named
Rogers, a man of considerable ability. His pupil held him in high
respect; yet, though he learned Euclid accurately from him, he told
Dr. Pritchard afterwards that “he knew no more of its real bearing and
intention than he knew of the man in the moon.” The results of the home
tuition were, none the less, exceedingly brilliant.
Herschel entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, at the age of
seventeen, and his aunt noted in her Diary that, from the time of his
admittance to the University until he quitted it, he gained all the
first prizes without exception. He graduated as Senior Wrangler and
First Smith’s Prizeman in 1813, a year in which honours were not cheap.
Peacock, subsequently Dean of Ely, took second place, Fearon Fallows,
the first Royal Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, came third, and
Babbage withdrew from the competition, judging himself unable to beat,
and not caring to be beaten by Herschel. Rivalry did not disturb their
friendship. Having entered, together with Peacock, into a juvenile
compact to do what in them lay “to leave the world wiser than they
found it,” they, in 1812, set about fulfilling it by the establishment
of the “Analytical Society of Cambridge.” Its object was to substitute
in England for Newton’s fluxional method the more flexible and powerful
calculus in use on the Continent; or, as Babbage expressed it, punning
on the required change of notation, “to uphold the principles of pure
D-ism in opposition to the _Dot_-age of the University.” The trio of
innovators were full of enthusiasm, and they carried through a reform
vital to the progress of British science. Herschel laboured zealously
in the cause. In combination with his two allies, he translated
Lacroix’s elementary treatise on the Differential Calculus, which
became a text-book at Cambridge; and published, in 1820, an admirable
volume of “Examples.” “In a very few years,” to use Babbage’s words,
“the change from dots to d’s was accomplished; and thus at last the
English cultivators of mathematical science, untrammelled by a limited
and imperfect system of signs, entered on equal terms into competition
with their Continental rivals.” Herschel, writing in the _Quarterly
Review_, playfully described the process by which this was brought
about. “The brows of many a Cambridge moderator,” he said, “were
elevated, half in ire, half in admiration, at the unusual answers which
began to appear in examination-papers. Even moderators are not made
of impenetrable stuff; their souls were touched, though fenced with
seven-fold Jacquier, and tough bull-hide of Vince and Wood. They were
carried away with the stream, in short, or replaced by successors full
of their newly acquired powers. The modern analysis was adopted in its
largest extent.”
John Herschel was one of Babbage’s “chief and choicest companions,” who
breakfasted with him every Sunday after chapel, and discussed, during
three or four delightful hours, “all knowable, and many unknowable
things.” His life-long friendship with Whewell began after his election
to a Fellowship of his College. It lent charm to the occasional
residences at Cambridge, which terminated in 1816, on his attaining the
dignity of Master of Arts. He celebrated his coming of age at home,
and was with his father at Brighton when Campbell characterised him as
“a prodigy in science, and fond of poetry, but very unassuming.” His
first publication was a paper on “Cotes’s Theorem,” sent, in October,
1812, to the Royal Society, of which body he was chosen a member, May
27, 1813. This was followed by a series of memoirs on various points
of analysis, their signal merit being recognised, in 1821, by the
bestowal of the Copley Medal. His investigations in pure mathematics
were carried no further; but he had done enough to show his power and
originality, and materially to widen the scope of the new methods.
He was in no hurry to choose a profession. Evenly balanced inclinations
demanded, circumstances indulged delay; so he paused. His father wished
him to enter the Church; but he preferred the law, and was enrolled
a student at Lincoln’s Inn, January 24, 1814. The step was a simple
formality. It committed him to nothing. And, in fact, while nominally
reading for the Bar, his thoughts were running in a totally different
direction. Dr. Wollaston, whose acquaintance he made in London,
fascinated him, and his influence served to steady the helm of his
intentions. Having decided finally for a scientific career, he returned
to Slough, and plunged into experiments in chemistry and physical
optics.
On September 10th, 1816, he informed a correspondent that he was
“going, under his father’s direction, to take up star-gazing.” This
brief sentence gives the first tidings of an astronomical element in
his life. Its growth was slow. He had no instinctive turn that way. It
was through filial reverence that he resolved to tread in his father’s
footsteps. His self-denial received a magnificent reward. He took a
place expressly reserved for him, as it might seem, beside his father
as an explorer of the skies on the grandest scale. But for this moral
purpose, he might have squandered time in a multiplicity of partial
researches. So late as 1830 he told Sir William Rowan Hamilton: “I find
it impossible to dwell for very long on one subject, and this renders
my pursuit of any branch of science necessarily very desultory.” His
nebulæ and double stars saved him from being “everything by turns,
and nothing long.” Their collection and revisal, begun as a duty,
grew to be irresistibly attractive, and John Herschel pledged himself
definitively to astronomy.
His earliest undertaking was the re-examination of his father’s
double stars. Entered upon at Slough in 1816, it was continued from
1821 to 1823 at the observatory in Blackman Street, Southwark, of
Mr., afterwards Sir James South, where, with two excellent refracting
telescopes, of five and seven feet focal length, the colleagues
measured 380 of Sir William Herschel’s original pairs. Double stars
want a great deal of looking after. Their discovery should be the
prelude to long processes of investigation. It is of little interest
unless diligently followed up. Each represents a system, individual
in its peculiarities, and probably of most complex organisation.
The more such systems are studied, the more wonderful they appear.
Two associated stars have often proved, on keener scrutiny, to be
themselves very closely double; and in other cases, disturbed motion
has revealed the existence of obscure masses--planets on a colossal
scale, possibly the spacious abodes of unimaginable forms of life.
The “Astronomy of the Invisible,” however, was still in the future when
Herschel and South did their work. Facts relating to binary revolutions
were scantily forthcoming, and the science to be founded on them had
been rather indicated than established. Fresh observations were then
needed to ascertain how the circling stars had behaved since 1802. The
results proved highly satisfactory. In Francis Baily’s words, “The
remarkable phenomena first brought to light by Sir William Herschel
were abundantly confirmed, and many new objects pointed out as worthy
the attention of future observers.” To take a couple of examples. Eta
Coronæ was found to have described, since 1781, one entire round,
and to be just starting on a second. Again, Tau Ophiuchi had been
perceived, by the elder Herschel, at his first sight of it in April,
1783, to be “elongated.” “One half of the small star,” he said, “if
not three-quarters, seems to be behind the large star.” This effect
was imperceptible to his son. It had become entirely effaced in the
course of forty years. The star was, in 1823, perfectly round; it had,
as it were, absorbed its companion. By slow degrees, however, the two
came into separate view, and now form an easy telescopic object. Their
period of revolution is not less than two centuries. Another point of
special interest was the detection of marked eccentricity in a stellar
orbit--that of Xi Ursæ Majoris. These stars perform their circuits in
just sixty years; but in 1821 their apparent speed was so great that
changes in their relative positions could be determined from month to
month. For these observations, published with notes and discussions in
the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1824, Herschel and South received
the Lalande Prize of the French Academy in 1825, and the Gold Medal of
the Astronomical Society in 1826. In the latter distinction, Wilhelm
Struve and Amici of Modena were associated with them. These four were
the only double star observers then living.
Their exertions served to define more closely the circumstances of
stellar movement. The crucial question could now be put, whether they
are governed by the force that binds the planets to the sun, or by
some other form of attractive influence. In other words, is the law of
gravitation universal? An answer could only be obtained experimentally,
by computing, on gravitational principles, the paths of the best-known
pairs, and then _trying the fit_. If the stars, as time went on, kept
near their predicted places, the unity of nature in this respect might
be safely inferred; although considerable discrepancies might in any
case be expected, owing to errors of measurement minute in themselves,
but large relatively to curves reduced by distance to hair-breadth
dimensions.
This kind of inquiry was fairly started in 1827, when Savary computed
the orbit of Xi Ursæ. His success made it almost certain that the pair
moved under the planetary regimen, conformed to, there is no reason
to doubt, by all binaries. John Herschel, although not the first, was
the most effective early investigator of stellar orbits. His method,
described before the Royal Astronomical Society January 13, 1832, and
approved by the award of its Gold Medal in 1833, went to the root of
the matter. The author declared it a mere waste of time to attempt to
deal, by any refined or intricate process of calculation, with data so
uncertain and irregular as those at hand. “Uncertain and irregular,”
it must be repeated, because referred to a scale on which tenths of
a second assume large proportions. He accordingly discarded, as mere
pedantic trifling, such analytical formulæ as those employed by Savary
and Encke, and had recourse to a graphical process, in which “the
aid of the eye and hand” was used to “guide the judgment in a case
where judgment only, and not calculation, could be of any avail.” The
operation which he went on to explain was commended by Sir George Airy
for its “elegance and practical utility.” Nothing more appropriate
could have been devised than this plan, at once simple, ingenious, and
accommodating, for drawing a curve representative of the successive
relative positions of double stars. Its invention effectively promoted
acquaintance with their orbits; most of those at present known having,
indeed, been calculated with its aid.
In 1821, Herschel travelled, in Babbage’s company, through Switzerland
and Italy. His only recorded adventure was an ascent of Monte Rosa.
In the following year he visited Holland with James Grahame, the
learned author of a “History of America”; and on the removal of
South’s observatory to Passy, he again went abroad, starting with
Babbage, but returning alone. This time he made a number of scientific
acquaintances. His father’s name worked like a spell. “I find myself,”
he said, “for his sake, received by all men of science with open arms.”
His modesty forbade him to remember that his own merits were already
conspicuous. In Paris, Arago and Fourier showed him all possible
attentions; he was welcomed at Turin “like a brother” by Plana, “one
of the most eminent mathematicians of the age;” at Modena, Amici was,
if possible, still more cordial. “He is the only man,” Herschel told
his aunt, “who has, since my father, bestowed great pains on the
construction of specula.” “Among other of your inquiring friends,” he
continued, “I should not omit the Abbé Piazzi, whom I found ill in
bed at Palermo, and who is a fine, respectable old man, though, I am
afraid, not much longer for this world. He remembered you personally,
having himself visited Slough.”
On July 3 Herschel “made the ascent of Etna, without particular
difficulty, though with excessive fatigue.” On the summit, reached
before sunrise, by “a desperate scramble up a cone of lava and ashes,
one thousand feet high,” he found himself “enveloped in suffocating
sulphurous vapours”; and “was glad enough to get down,” after having
made a reading of the barometer in concert with the simultaneous
observations of the brothers Gemellaro at Catania and Nicolosi. The
same night he arrived at Catania “almost dead” from the morning’s
arduous climb, “and the dreadful descent of nearly thirty miles, where
the mules could scarce keep their feet.”
In traversing Germany, he deviated to Erlangen, where Pfaff was
engaged in translating Sir William Herschel’s writings; and visited
Encke, Lindenau, and Harding, at Seeberg, Gotha, and Göttingen. With
Göttingen he had a special tie through his creation, in 1816, an
honorary member of the University; and at Göttingen, too, he hoped to
meet Gauss--a man of strange, and--to the lay mind--unintelligible
powers. “Gauss was a god,” one of his fellow-mathematicians said of
him; but the “god” was on this occasion absent--feasting with the
“blameless Ethiopians,” perhaps, like the Homeric deities when wanted.
He was reported “inconsolable” for the lost opportunity, which seems
never to have recurred.
From Munich Herschel wrote to his aunt, in view of his approaching
visit to Hanover:--“I hope you haven’t forgotten your English, as
I find myself not quite so fluent in this language (German) as I
expected. In fact, since leaving Italy, I have so begarbled my German
with Italian that it is unintelligible both to myself and to everyone
that hears it: and what is very perverse, though when in Italy I could
hardly talk Italian fit to be heard, I can now talk nothing else, and
whenever I want a German word, pop comes the Italian one in its place.
I made the waiter to-day stare (he being a Frenchman) by calling to
him, ‘Wollen Sie avere la bontà den acet zu apportaren!’ But this, I
hope, will soon wear off.”
His next foreign holiday was spent in France. He had designed a new
instrument for measuring the intensity of the sun’s radiations, and
was eager to experiment with it alternately at high and low levels,
for the purpose of determining the proportion of solar heat absorbed
by the earth’s atmosphere. This method was employed with fine effect
by Professor Langley on Mount Whitney in 1881. Herschel carried his
“actinometer” to the top of the Puy de Dôme in September 1826, and
waited at Montpellier for “one day of intense sunshine,” in order
to procure his second term of comparison. The Puy de Dôme, with its
associated three hundred summits, strongly allured him. “I have been
rambling over the volcanoes of Auvergne,” he wrote from Montpellier,
September 17, “and propose, before I quit this, to visit an extinct
crater which has given off two streams of lava at Agde, a town about
thirty miles south of this place on the road to the Spanish frontier.
Into Spain, however, I do not mean to go--having no wish to have my
throat cut. I am told that a regular diligence runs between this and
Madrid, and is as regularly stopped and robbed on the way.”
This exploratory turn alarmed Miss Herschel. “I fear,” she replied,
“you must often be exposed to great dangers by creeping about in holes
and corners among craters of volcanoes.” He was, nevertheless, only
dissuaded by his mother’s anxious remonstrances from pursuing their
study in Madeira and Teneriffe.
In the autumn of 1827, Babbage accompanied him to Ireland. The young
Astronomer Royal, Sir W. R. Hamilton, was unluckily absent at the time
of their visit; but he sent Herschel, by way of compensation, one of
his brilliant optical essays, and a correspondence sprang up from which
a lasting friendship developed.
Herschel’s scientific occupations at home were meanwhile various and
pressing. He co-operated in the foundation of the Astronomical Society,
and became in 1821 its first foreign secretary. In 1824 he undertook
the more onerous duties of secretary to the Royal Society, and rented a
house in Devonshire Street for the three years of his term of office.
Astronomy, it might have been feared, should be at least temporarily
shelved; yet he informed his aunt, April 18, 1825, “A week ago I had
the twenty-foot directed on the nebulæ in Virgo, and determined the
right ascensions and polar distances of thirty-six of them. These
curious objects I shall now take into my especial charge--nobody else
can see them.”
His telescope, in fact, then held the championship. It was constructed
in 1820 by himself, under his father’s directions, on the “front view”
plan, the speculum being eighteen inches in diameter, and of twenty
feet focal length. With it he executed, in 1824, a fine drawing of the
Orion Nebula, with which “inexplicable phenomenon” he was profoundly
impressed. It suggested to him no idea of a starry composition, and he
likened its aspect to that presented by the “breaking up of a mackerel
sky, when the clouds of which it consists begin to assume a cirrous
appearance.”
In July, 1828, he succeeded in discerning the two Uranian satellites,
Oberon and Titania, _authentically_ discovered by his father. They had
not been seen, except incidentally at Slough, for thirty years. His
pursuit of them, continued at intervals until 1832, had the result
of confirming, while slightly correcting, Sir William Herschel’s
elements of their motions. On September 23, 1832, he perceived Biela’s
comet as a round, hazy object without a tail. It closely simulated a
pretty large nebula. A small knot of very faint stars lay directly
in its path, and, having before long overtaken them, it “presented,
when on the cluster, the appearance of a nebula partly resolved into
stars, the stars of the cluster being visible through the comet.” They
shone undimmed, he estimated, from behind a veil of cometary matter
50,000 miles thick. Yet, only a month later, the remote prospect of a
collision with this tenuous body threw Europe into a panic.
After Sir William Herschel’s death, his son formed the project of
collecting into a memorial volume all his published papers; but he
decided before long that he could add more to his fame by pursuing
and verifying his observations than by reprinting them. The keynote
of his life’s activity was struck in these words. His review of the
2,500 Herschelian nebulæ, more than half of which were invisible with
any instrument except his own, was begun in the summer of 1825, and
terminated in 1833. The assiduity with which it was prosecuted appeared
by its completion in little more than half the time judged necessary
for the purpose by the original discoverer. Yet he was not exempt
from discouragement. “Two stars last night,” he wrote, July 23, 1830,
“and sat up till two waiting for them. Ditto the night before. Sick
of star-gazing--mean to break the telescopes and melt the mirrors.”
Very few glimpses of this seamy side to the occupation are afforded us
by either of the Slough observers. Modern astronomers, by comparison,
would seem, like the Scotchman’s barometer, to have “lost all control
over the weather.”
The efficacious promptitude with which John Herschel swept the skies
appears truly wonderful when we remember that he was without a skilled
assistant. No ready pen was at hand to record what he saw, and how
he saw it; he was, by necessity, his own amanuensis; and writing by
lamplight unfits the eye for receiving delicate impressions. Yet a
multitude of the objects for which quest was being made were of the
last degree of faintness. The results were none the less admirable.
Embodied in a catalogue of 2,307 nebulæ, of which 525 were new, they
were presented to the Royal Society July 1, 1833, and printed in the
_Philosophical Transactions_ (vol. cxxiii.). Annotations of great
interest, and over one hundred beautiful drawings, enhanced the value
of the memoir.
Herschel was struck, in the course of his review, by the nebulous
relations of double stars. A close, faint pair at the exact centre of
a small round nebula in Leo; stellar foci in nebular ellipses; and a
strange little group consisting of a trio of equidistant stars relieved
against a nebulous shield, were specimen-instances illustrating “a
point of curious and high physical interest.”
He also drew attention to “the frequent and close proximity to
planetary nebulæ of minute stars which suggest the idea of accompanying
satellites. Such they may possibly be.” If so, their revolutions might
eventually be ascertained; and he urged the desirability of exact and
persistent determinations of the positions of these satellite-stars.
“I regret,” he concluded, “not having sufficiently attended to this in
my observations, the few measures given being hurried, imperfect, and
discordant.” Up to the present, these supposed systems have remained
sensibly fixed; but they have been a good deal neglected. Mr. Burnham’s
observations, however, with the Lick refractor in 1890–1, may supply a
basis for the future detection of their movements in periods probably
to be reckoned by millenniums.
The orbital circulation of compound nebulæ must be at least equally
slow. They are most diverse in form and arrangement. “All the varieties
of double stars as to distance, position, and relative brightness,”
Herschel wrote, “have their counterparts in nebulæ; besides which, the
varieties of form and gradation of light in the latter afford room for
combinations peculiar to this class of objects.” Such, for instance, as
the disparate union of an immensely long nebulous ray in Canes Venatici
with a dim round companion, a small intermediate star occupying
possibly the centre of gravity of the system.
Herschel’s drawings of double nebulæ have gained significance through
their discussion, in 1892, by Dr. T. J. J. See of Chicago. They are
now perceived to form a series aptly illustrative of the process,
theoretically investigated by Poincaré and Darwin, by which a cooling
and contracting body, under the stress of its consequently accelerated
rotation, divides into two. If it be homogeneous in composition,
its “fission” gives rise to two equal masses, presumed to condense
eventually into a pair of equal stars. Disparity, on the other hand,
between the products of fission indicates original heterogeneity;
so that a large nebula must be of denser consistence than a smaller
one physically connected with it. The chemical dissimilarity of the
stars developed from them might explain the colour-contrasts often
presented by unequal stellar couples. This view as to the origin of
double nebulæ, and through them of double stars, although doubtless
representing only a fragment of the truth, gives wonderful coherence to
Herschel’s faithful delineations of what his telescope showed him.
No one before him had completely seen the “Dumb-bell” nebula in
Vulpecula. Sir William Herschel had perceived the “double-headed shot”
part of this “most amazing object,” but had missed the hazy sheath
which his successor noticed as filling in the elliptic outline. He
perceived similarly (unaware of Schröter’s observation) that the
interior of the Ring-nebula in Lyra is not entirely dark; and compared
the effect to that of fine gauze stretched over a hoop. An exceedingly
long, nebular ellipse in Andromeda, with a narrow interior vacuity,
left him “hardly a doubt of its being a thin, flat ring of enormous
dimensions, seen very obliquely.” A photograph taken by Dr. Roberts, in
1891, corresponds strikingly with Herschel’s drawing. Some specimens of
“rifted nebulæ,” were also included in the collection of 1833. They are
double or even triple parallel rays, fragments, apparently, of single
primitive formations. Herschel might well assert that “some of the most
remarkable peculiarities of nebulæ had escaped every former observer.”
Both by the Royal, and by the Royal Astronomical Societies, medals
were, in 1836, adjudged to this fine work. Its progress was
accompanied by the discovery of 3,347 double stars, as well as by the
re-measurement of a large number of pairs already known. The whole
were drawn up into eight catalogues, presented at intervals to the
Astronomical Society, and printed in their Memoirs. A good many of
them would, nevertheless, be rejected by modern astronomers as “not
worth powder and shot,” the stars composing them being too far apart to
give more than an infinitesimal chance of mutual connection. From May
1828 onwards, these measures were made with “South’s _ci-devant_ great
equatorial,” purchased by Herschel. The object-glass, by Tulley, was
five inches in diameter. With a twelve-inch refractor, its successor
in South’s observatory on Campden Hill, Herschel detected, on its
trial-night, February 13, 1830, the sixth star in the “trapezium” of
Orion. This minute object was then about one-third as bright as the
fifth star in the same group, discovered by Robert Hooke in 1664, but
forgotten, and re-discovered by Struve in 1826. A slow gain of light in
Herschel’s star is not improbable.
He refused, in 1826, to compete for the Lucasian Professorship of
Mathematics at Cambridge. It was practically at his disposal, since all
agreed that no one could better than Herschel have filled the chair
once occupied by Newton. He was, however, disinclined for an University
career, and had undertaken labours incompatible with it. In 1830 he
stood as the “scientific candidate” for the presidentship of the Royal
Society, against the Duke of Sussex. His defeat was by “a ridiculously
small majority.” “I had no personal interest in the contest,” he
wrote to Sir William Hamilton. “Had my private wishes and sense of
individual advantage weighed with me in opposition to what, under the
circumstances, was an imperative duty, I should have persisted in my
refusal to be brought forward; but there are situations where one _has_
no choice, and such was mine.”
He made Hamilton’s personal acquaintance at a dinner of notabilities,
given by the Duke of Sussex, in March, 1832. An invitation to Slough
followed, and Hamilton, arriving “in a beautiful star-time,” enjoyed
celestial sights that seemed the opening of a new firmament.
Herschel married, March 3, 1829, Margaret Brodie, second daughter of
the Rev. Alexander Stewart, of Dingwall, in Ross-shire. The event--not
merely by convention a “happy” one--gave great satisfaction to his
numerous friends. Miss Herschel was beside herself with glad emotion.
“I have spent four days,” she informed him on his wedding-day, “in
vain endeavours to gain composure enough to give you an idea of the
joyful sensation caused by the news. But I can at this moment find no
words which would better express my happiness than those of Simeon:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” But there was
no finality in her desires for this brilliant scion of her race.
His domestic felicity did not long content her; she craved worldly
distinctions. When, after the accession of William IV., a shower of
honours was let fall, she began to think plain “John Herschel, Esq.,”
an address very inadequate to his merits. “Dr. Grosskopf,” the husband
of one of her nieces, “has been _zum Ritter ernannt_ by his present
Majesty,” she wrote discontentedly. “So was Dr. Mükry last week. If all
is betitled in England and Germany, why is not my nephew, J. H., a lord
or a wycount (_sic_) at least? General Komarzewsky used to say to your
father, ‘Why does not King George III. make you Duke of Slough?’”
An instalment of her wishes was granted by his creation, in 1831, a
Knight of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order; and she lived to see him
a baronet. She had no inkling of his approaching journey to the Cape
when he came to see her in June, 1832, although the visit was designed
as a farewell. Hanover itself, too, had for him an ancestral charm.
“It was only this evening,” he wrote home, “that, escaping from a
party at Mrs. Beckedorff’s, I was able to indulge in what my soul has
been yearning for ever since I came here--a solitary ramble out of
town, among the meadows which border the Leine-strom, from which the
old, tall, sombre-looking Marktthurm, and the three beautiful lanthorn
steeples of Hanover are seen as in the little picture I have often
looked at with a sort of mysterious wonder when a boy, as that strange
place in foreign parts that my father and uncle used to talk so much
about, and so familiarly. The _likeness_ is correct, and I soon found
the point of view.”
Almost from the beginning of his surveying operations, Herschel
cherished the hope of extending them to the southern hemisphere. But
during his mother’s lifetime, he took no steps towards its realisation.
The separation would have been cruel. Her death, however, on January
6th, 1832, at the age of eighty-one, removed this obstacle, and
the scheme rapidly took shape. The station originally thought of
was Parramatta, in New South Wales; but Dunlop’s observations there
anticipated him, and he reflected with disappointment that “the cream
of the southern hemisphere had been skimmed” before his turn came. He
learned afterwards that nothing important in the “sweeping” line had
been done at Parramatta; he had virgin skies to explore. A trip to the
Himalayas was his next ambition; and one of the recommendations of the
Cape of Good Hope was its being “within striking distance of India.”
But to India he never went. The Cape was beyond question the most
suitable locality for his purpose, and it would have been waste of time
to have left it, even temporarily, for any other. He was offered a free
passage thither in a ship of war, but preferred to keep his enterprise
altogether on a private footing. So having embarked with his wife,
three children, and instrumental outfit, on board the _Mountstuart
Elphinstone_, he left the shores of England, November 13, 1833.