described this discovery of the distance of a fixed star as the greatest and most glorious triumph which practical astronomy has perhaps ever witnessed, and the three who shared the triumph between them were Bessel with 61 Cygni, Henderson[1] of Edinburgh with α Centauri, and Struve of Dorpat with α Lyræ. Bessel's object-glass, that he got cut in two to form a heliometer. Sir John saw at Munich before it was mounted, considered it invaluable, and believed that genius alone could have dared to divide it in two for the purposes of science. Caroline Herschel's delight, in her retirement, at the success of these three astronomers in following her baffled brother's lead may be imagined. To know that the parallax of a fixed star had been found by Bessel to be the 31100 of a second! To know that it was a double star! To know, besides, that the smaller of the two companion stars revolved round the larger in an orbit fifty times the diameter of the earth's orbit round the sun, or two and a half times that of Uranus! and to know also that the pair of stars were 670,000 times as distant from us as is the sun! To her these discoveries were a delightful commentary on her brother's words—" In this case, millions of years are perhaps but moments." The "little old woman" in the "abominable city" of Hanover, unable to endure "happy England," where her dead hero was buried, and where his son, her nephew, was a foremost name in the world of science, revelled in the news that
- ↑ It is only just to Henderson to say that he was preferred by Lord Advocate Jeffrey to the Edinburgh Professorship of Astronomy over his rival, Thomas Carlyle. Froude was guilty of an unpardonable blunder in printing the unwise and acrimonious criticism of Carlyle on Henderson's fitness for the post. Facts had given a verdict in Henderson's favour.
