CHAPTER VIII
"THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HEAVENS"[1]
The writer who described Herschel's papers as "lively and amusing" may have intended a sneer, but he did a great wrong to inquiries and facts as novel as they were inspiring. Whatever helps to lift man's thoughts above the littlenesses of life and time is a distinct gain to the human race, altogether irrespective of the uses to which, in course of time, it may be applied. Herschel's papers on The Construction of the Heavens were of this nature. They were among the first he wrote; they were also among the last. He wrote at least eight papers on the subject, covering three hundred and thirty quarto pages: he began the series in 1784, he finished it in 1818, and he left the work as a legacy to his son, who nobly honoured his father's memory by doing for the southern hemisphere what the father did for the northern. Even though these labours had been nothing more than an attempt on man's part to penetrate the workshop of
- ↑ This is Herschel's own phrase, taken probably from the notice of Ptolemy's Almagest (145 A.D.) in Lalande's Astronomy (1771 A.D.), where its title is given in Latin, Magna Constructio (i. 156). The phrase does not deserve the condemnation it received from an Edinburgh Reviewer in January 1803; but a later Reviewer accepts it in July 1848, "to use a phrase which Sir W. Herschel introduced" (p. 105). "Introduced" is scarcely correct.
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