country, and seeing where one source at least of its true greatness lay, called attention to our rulers' disregard of education and science. "The return of the sword to its scabbard" in 1815, says an author who wrote fifteen years later, "seems to have been the signal for one universal effort to recruit exhausted resources, to revive industry and civilisation, and to direct to their proper objects the genius and talent which war had either exhausted in its service or repressed in its desolations. In this rivalry of skill, England alone has hesitated to take a part." France was leading the way, and was making up the ground it had lost. "Let us frankly acknowledge the fact," Arago wrote, "at the time when Herschel was prosecuting his beautiful observations, there existed in France no instrument adapted for developing them; we had not even the means of verifying them. Fortunately for the scientific honour of our country, mathematical analysis is also a powerful instrument. Laplace gave ample proof of this on a memorable occasion, when from the retirement of his chamber he predicted, he minutely announced, what the excellent astronomer of Windsor would see with the largest telescopes which were ever constructed by the hand of man." And he adds, "It is for nations especially to bear in remembrance the ancient adage, noblesse oblige!"[1]
It was not and had not been an uncommon thing for kings and princes to encourage research, when George iii. extended his patronage to the toiling musician of Bath. For two hundred years, at least, it had been a common thing in Europe—so common, indeed, that, if Herschel thought of it as a possibility
- ↑ Arago, Biographies, 223, 237.
