WILLIAM HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK
CHAPTER I
THE FAMILY
Cicero in his exquisite little book, written two thousand years ago in the infancy of astronomy, and called Scipio's Dream, delighted the Roman world of his day with stories of the stars, which were a mixture of romance and truth. He formed some idea of their movements from a rough approach that had been made even then to a globe of the heavens, and he filled his readers with awe at the music which was believed to accompany their passage through space. The music of the spheres has passed into our language and our thoughts at the present day. But it would have been the greatest wonder of all could Cicero have foreseen that, more than nineteen centuries after his day, the true music of the spheres and the truest means of hearing it sung would be discovered by the genius, the almost unaided genius, of "a philosopher without the rules," a musician in the town of Bath, then a haunt of savages or wild beasts. He was organist in the Octagon Chapel of that city, the director of
