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of William Herschel.
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necessary, as he has amply shown in his Catalogue of Double Stars. One is reminded of his remarks on the use of the high magnifying powers by the impatience of his comments.
His proposal to call the newly discovered minor planets asteroids (1802) was received as a sign that he wished to discriminate between the discoveries of Piazzi and Olbers and his own discovery of Uranus.[1]
He takes pains to quietly put this on one side in one of his papers, showing that he was cognizant of the existence of such a feeling.
I am tempted to resurrect from a deserved obscurity a notice of Herschel's Observations on the Two Lately Discovered Celestial Bodies
- ↑ "Of late years these expectations have been more than accomplished by the discovery of no fewer than four planetary bodies, almost all in the same place; but so small that Dr. Herschel refuses to honor them with the name of planets, and chooses to call them asteroids, though for what reason it is not easy to determine, unless it be to deprive the discoverers of these bodies of any pretence for rating themselves as high in the list of astronomical discoverers as himself."—History of the Royal Society, by Thomas Thomson, p. 358. This work was published in 1812, and therefore during the lifetime of Herschel.
