was of the same nature as the scientific proof that steamboats could not cross the Atlantic, and was belied, as the other was, by facts.
To Herschel then belongs the credit not merely of having suspected the revolution of sun round sun in the far distant realms of space, but also of actually detecting the fact that this was going on among the stars. He has the credit also of having, with imperfect appliances, measured the angles which enabled him to calculate the times of revolution of these systems of suns. It was a beginning, a wonderful beginning of a new departure in man's warfare with ignorance, and with the bonds that tie him down to the earth. He did not know, probably he was so wrapt up in his own conceptions of the usefulness of the telescope, that he could not imagine a more potent revealer of the secrets of the universe than a gigantic mirror at the bottom of a gigantic tube, or an immense eye at the object end of a telescope. A glass prism has done what the telescope could not do, revealed double stars where they were not known to exist, shown their rates of motion to or from us, and where an unseen ball is a companion to a living and a lighted sun, told us what they are made of, and enabled us to weigh them as if they were in the scales of a balance. To be able to do this, or apprehend the way it has been done, or even to know the fact, lifts human nature to a loftier height than it ever attained in the past, and the pioneer in this elevation of mankind was originally a bandsman in the Hanoverian Guards, a musician of Bath. Nor should it be forgotten that the improvement of the telescope, with which these revelations of the secret things of the starry heavens
