Edward Singleton Holden

“ It is indeed true that unless a particular star is of the same intrinsic brightness as our largest stars, this reasoning does not apply to it; in just so far as the average star is less bright than the average brightness of our largest stars, will the numbers which Herschel obtained be diminished. But for every star of which his hypothesis is true, we may assert that his conclusions are true, and no one can deny, with any show of reason, that, on the whole, his suppositions must be valid. On the whole, the stars which we call faint are farther from us than the brighter ones ”

“ I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude. What do you say to the leading philosophers of the faculty here, to whom I have offered a thousand times to show my studies, but who. . . have never consented to look at planets, nor Moon, nor telescope? Verily, just as serpents close their ears, so do these men close their eyes to the light of truth. ”

“ The planet Saturn, on the contrary, seems never to have been lost sight of from the time of his first view of it in 1772.
The field of discovery always appears to be completely occupied until the advent of a great man, who, even by his way of putting old and familiar facts, shows the paths along which discoveries must come, if at all. This faculty comes from profound reflection on the nature of the subject itself, from a sort of transmuting power which changes the words of the books into the things of reality. Herschel's paper on Saturn, in 1790, is an admirable example of this. ”

“ Galileo's private life was essentially peaceful, as a whole even ‘enviable.’ To the world in general he is, on the other hand, the protomartyr. His trials have opened new roads for human thought, given liberty to science and philosophy, and were the occasion of a final delimitation of the provinces of the church and of philosophy. The modern attitude of mind may be said to take its date from him. It is in this that his greatest service to mankind consists. The astonishing discoveries that we owe to his genius are small matters in comparison. ”

“ As a study of the height to which the efforts of one man may go, it is almost without a parallel. The philosopher who will add to it to-day, will have his facts and his methods ready to his hands. Herschel presents the almost unique example of an eager observer marshaling the multitude of single instances, which he himself has laboriously gathered, into a compact and philosophic whole. ”

“ From this moment no competent witness could doubt the truth of the Copernican system—Galileo less than any one.
An opportunity unique in the history of the world was presented to Galileo and he utilized it to the full. He went from triumph to triumph. The phases of Venus, the mountains of the moon, the constitution of the Milky Way, the tricorporate figure of Saturn, the solar spots, the moons of Jupiter, were death-blows to the systems of Aristotle and of Ptolemy, and were skilfully utilized to establish the system of Copernicus. ”

“ The study of the original papers, together with a knowledge of the circumstances in which they were written, will abundantly show that Herschel's ideas sprung from a profound meditation of the nature of things in themselves. What the origin of trains of thought prosecuted for years may have been we cannot say, nor could he himself have expressed it. A new path in science was to be found out, and he found it. It was not in his closet, surrounded by authorities, but under the open sky, that he meditated the construction of the heavens. ”

“ Sixteen hundred years earlier Lucretius had come near to the same truth: “For whenever bodies fall through water and thin air they must quicken their descents in proportion to their weights, because the body of water and subtle nature of air can not retard everything to an equal degree; on the other hand, empty void can not offer resistance to anything in any direction at any time, but must continually give way; and for this reason all things must be moved and borne along with equal velocity, though of unequal weights, through the unresisting void.” ”

“ It is certainly a remarkable fact that Herschel was the first observer to recognize the real importance of the aperture or diameter of a telescope. Before his time it was generally assumed that this element only conditioned the amount of light transmitted to the eye, or, in other words, merely determined the brightness of the image. Hence the conclusion that if an object is sufficiently bright, the telescope may be made as small as desired without loss of power. ”

“ The Grand Duke and most of the court were his admiring friends. He had every freedom for research if only he would leave the interpretation of scripture to theological experts. ‘Write freely, but keep outside the sacristy’ his friends advised. Why did he remain in Rome? To convert the Congregation of the Index to Copernicanism? This would have been a triumph for science, and a personal triumph as well. The Roman Curia had absolutely no interest in science as such. They were determined that religion should not suffer. Galileo's brilliant lectures were not conceived in the spirit that convinces. ”

“ But it was not till the last two months of the same year that I felt the least encouragement to spend the star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar-frost, without a human being near enough to be within call. ”

“ On the earth a pendulum stops because of the resistance of the air and the friction at its supports. Remove the air and annul the friction and it will swing forever until some impressed force stops it, so Galileo announced. Kepler was incessantly trying to conceive how a planet could continue to move in its orbit, and was forced to conclude that some inherent energy, perhaps an angel, perpetually acted to keep it moving. Galileo's law announces that if it is once set in motion it will continue to move until some impressed and extraneous force causes it to stop. ”

“ We found him at his telescope. The comet was very small, and had nothing grand or striking in its appearance; but it is the first lady's comet, and I was very desirous to see it. Mr. Herschel then showed me some of his new discovered universes, with all the good humor with which he would have taken the same trouble for a brother or a sister astronomer; there is no possibility of admiring his genius more than his gentleness. ”

“ This is daily done, if possible, on every one of the ships sailing out of New York City, and on the skill of her officers, the goodness of her chronometers, and the accuracy of their rates, depends the safety of her passengers and cargo. To all men of business, then, in their appointments and affairs on shore and in their commercial ventures by sea, the fact that a standard time is easily attainable and perfectly correct is of no slight importance. To travelers, whether by sea or land, it is truly a matter of life and death. ”

“ If this be a true account of the solar heat, for the support of which I appeal to my experiments, it remains only for us to admit that such of the rays of the sun as have the refrangibility of those which are contained in the prismatic spectrum, by the construction of the organs of sight, are admitted under the appearance of light and colors, and that the rest, being stopped in the coats and humors of the eye, act on them, as they are known to do on all the other parts of our body, by occasioning a sensation of heat. ”

“ THERE is a certain fascination in our scanty knowledge of the elder nations of the earth, which is due quite as much to their chronological position as to the intrinsic interest of their doings and sayings; and it owes not a little of its keenness to the very scantiness of that knowledge.
We are continually told that this is a practical century; that we are utilitarians in the strictest sense; that there is no romantic faculty left to us; that we are apt to scorn all knowledge which has not a direct practical bearing on the daily life and interests of us all. ”

“ The ratio of the light entering the eye when directed toward a star, to the whole light given out by the star, would be as the area of the pupil of the eye to the area of the whole sphere having the star as a centre and our distance from the star as a radius. If the eye is assisted by a telescope, the ratio is quite different. In that case the ratio of the light which enters the eye to the whole light, would be as the area of the mirror or object-glass to the area of the whole sphere having the star as a centre and its distance as a radius. ”

“ William Watson, a Fellow of the Royal Society, distinguished for his researches in electricity, happened to see him at his telescope, and this led to a visit and an invitation to Herschel to join the Philosophical Society of Bath, then forming. This he gladly did, and it was of use to him in many ways.
He there formed acquaintance with men of his own way of thinking, and he himself became known. Better than all, he learned to measure himself with other men, and by his early papers read to the Society, he gained skill in putting his thoughts before his hearers. ”

“ The opinion of most astronomers has been, that personal equation is not purely a physiological phenomenon, but likewise a psychological. The time required for the sound of the clock to reach the observer's brain, and the time required for the light to pass from the image of the star, so as to excite the nerves of vision, are both very small: it is the coördinating power of the brain that works slowly—and absolute personal equation is largely the measure of the time required for the brain to superpose two different sensations, to coördinate impressions derived from different sets of nerves. ”

“ The equality which I propose does not require that the stars should be at equal distances from each other, nor is it necessary that all those of the same nominal magnitude should be equally distant from us. ”

“ Nature, on the contrary, is inexorable and unchangeable, and cares not whether her hidden causes and modes of working are intelligible to the human understanding or not, and never deviates from her prescribed laws.” It appears to me, therefore, says Galileo, that no effect of nature, which experience places before our eyes, or is the necessary conclusion derived from evidence, should be rendered doubtful by passages of Scripture which contain thousands of words admitting of various interpretations, for every sentence of Scripture is not bound by such rigid laws as is every effect of Nature. ”

“ Herschel assumed that they were nearly equably arranged all through the space in question. He only examined one other arrangement, viz., that of a ring of stars surrounding the sun, and he pronounced against such an arrangement, for the reason that there is absolutely nothing in the size or brilliancy of the sun to cause us to suppose it to be the centre of such a gigantic system. No reason, except its importance to us personally, can be alleged for such a supposition. Every star will have its own appearance of a Galaxy or Milky Way, which will vary according to the situation of the star. ”

“ It was no wonder that young Langley, whose genius lay in quite another direction, should look about him, after his graduation from the school, to see if there were not some practicable way in which he could pursue those mechanical and astronomical studies that already had fascinated him. He had little inclination to enter college, and the openings in astronomy proper were very rare in those years, even rarer than now. Since he was ten years old, he had been reading and studying astronomy, making small telescopes, using these and others, with various success, but always with ardor. ”