books they read. But the spirit of a wholesome rivalry, which it awoke in many bosoms, did more for astronomy than its builder or it ever did. It was the origin of other instruments of the same kind, as grand as itself or even grander. Some men of science, waspishly inclined perhaps, denounced the great telescope as of no use. Both in England and on the Continent this was said, and most unfairly, as everyone who reads Herschel's papers may discover for himself. He has frankly and fully explained in his writings[1] why he preferred to use other and smaller telescopes, and perhaps to use them oftener, but his love for and his pride in this work of his hands is ever and again coming to the front. One instance alone deserves to be quoted as a specimen: "I saw the fourth satellite and the ring of Saturn in the 40-feet speculum without an eye-glass."[2]
But it was seldom that astronomers on the Continent followed the example of William Herschel or gave themselves the trouble he took. Some of them did. Of "Professor Amici, an artist and a man of science of the first rank," his son. Sir John Herschel, writes: "He is the only man who has, since my father, bestowed great pains on the construction of specula, and his 10-foot telescopes with 12-inch mirrors are of very extraordinary perfection." This was true at the time it was written, two years after his father's death. It did not remain true, for Lord Rosse's great 6-feet mirror and 56-feet tube had still to come. And like Herschel, Lord Rosse was his own workman. When visiting him at Birr Castle in 1862,
