"Herschel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quotes a remarkable passage in the postscript to a letter written to Sir John Herschel in 1836: "In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable it may be carried on through ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... No Herschel counts the stars, numbers the planets, measures the length of their years and computes the number of their days, unless his observatory is illuminated by the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. No Luther thunders against priestcraft, shakes the thrones of tyrants, and wakes the nations ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... flesh and blood,—was dim, elfish, wan, with large, mild eyes, as blue and misty as the nebulae that Herschel found in Southern skies,—eyes that looked at nothing, but seemed to penetrate the universe and shed soft solemn light over all things. Back from the broad, low brow, floated a cloud of silky yellow ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 13th, 1781, Sir William Herschel was, as usual, engaged on examining some small stars, and, noticing that one of them appeared to be larger than the fixed stars, suspected that it might be a comet. To test this he increased his magnifying power from 227 to ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... forests, or augmented by planting them, has led the public to suppose that their assertions rested on sufficient proof. We cannot affirm that in none of these cases did such proof exist, but I am not aware that it has ever been produced. [Footnote: Among recent writers, Clave, Schacht, Sir John F. W. Herschel, Hohenstein, Barth, Asbjornsen, Boussingault, and others, maintain that forests tend to produce rain and clearings to diminish it, and they refer to numerous facts of observation in support of this doctrine; but in none of these does it appear ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... this motion of the solar system has been known since the time of Sir William Herschel. It is toward the constellation Hercules, which, at this season, may be seen in the northeastern sky at 9 o'clock in the evening. As the line of this motion makes an angle of fifty odd degrees with the plane of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... the 7th: their positions: the waggoner's star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the interdependent gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel, Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... hundred years they were supposed to be islands of scoriae floating in the sea of molten matter. But they were depressed below the surface, and showed a notch when on the edge. Wilson originated and Herschel developed the theory that the sun's real body was dark, cool, and habitable, and that the photosphere was a luminous stratum at a distance from the real body, with openings showing the dark spots below. Such a sun would have cooled off in a week, but would ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... versification, quadratic equations, conic sections, the differential calculus, are very good things, and we are well aware that it is by excellence in them that the highest honours in these seminaries of learning can alone be attained. They are essential to the fame of a Parr or a Porson, a Herschel or a Whewell. But a very different species of mental training is required for advantageous travelling. Men will soon find that neither Greek prose nor Latin prose, Greek verse nor Latin verse, will avail them when they come ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Its appearance gave rise to much discussion among astronomers. On the 17th Sir John Herschel saw its nucleus from Collingwood in Kent, and on the following night a dim nebula only; so it was ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... to be made for his late majesty George III. as a challenge against the late Dr. Herschel's; but was prevented from being completed till some time after. The metals, 9-1/4 inches in diameter, having a diagonal eye-piece, four eye tubes of different magnifying powers, and three small specula of various radii, were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... there was an outcry at once against "atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite clamour, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Arbitration is to meet in Paris, and is to consist of two Englishmen, Baron Herschel, and Sir Richard Henn Collins, a Judge of the English Supreme Court; one American, Judge Brewer; and one member chosen by Venezuela, who is also an American, the Hon. Melville Weston Fuller, Chief Justice of ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 16, February 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... celestial equator as we cross the line. To us the most magnificent sight in the tropical heavens is the "Milky Way," especially near Sobieski's Shield, where it is very luminous. We observed that this starry tract divided at [Greek: a] Centauri, as Herschel says, and not at [Greek: b], as many maps and globes have it. The brightest stars in the southern hemisphere follow the direction of a great circle passing through [Greek: e] Orionis and ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... also appears capable of explaining fully the remarkable phenomena observed by M. Arago between metals and magnets when neither are moving (120.), as well as most of the results obtained by Sir John Herschel, Messrs. Babbage, Harris, and others, in repeating his experiments; accounting at the same time perfectly for what at first appeared inexplicable; namely, the non-action of the same metals and magnets when at rest. These results, which also afford the readiest means of obtaining ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... 5, 1793, there happened an eclipse which, annular to the N. of Scotland, was seen and observed in England by Sir W. Herschel[107] as a partial eclipse. He made some important observations on the Moon on this occasion measuring the height of several of the lunar mountains. Considerations respecting the shape of one of the Moon's horns led him to form an opinion adverse to the idea that there the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... success of the Moon Hoax, perpetrated in 1835. It was generally known that Sir John Herschel had gone to the Cape of Good Hope to erect an observatory. One day the New York Sun came out with what purported to be part of a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, giving an account of Herschel's remarkable discoveries. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... ship cedar boats up to Herschel Island now. I haven't seen one of these bark boats for years. But these are ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... eyes of earth unknown, Herschel looked heavenwards in the starlight pale; Lost in those awful depths he trod alone, Laplace stood mute before the lifted veil; While home-bred Humboldt ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... perspective designed, the various distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were so correct that those who have since continued the work have little to add but to give precision to these and fill them up.[5347] In their hands, from Herschel and Laplace, from Volta, Cuvier, Ampere, Fresnel and Faraday to Darwin and Pasteur, Burnouf, Mommsen and Renan, the blanks on the canvas have been covered, the relief of the figures shown and new features added in the sense of the old ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at a rate and in a course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like of him have succeeded in detecting,—is to me as precious as to another. But is this what thou namest 'Mechanism of the Heavens,' and 'System of the World;' this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel's Fifteen thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been—looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... pretend to decide whether slavery was right or wrong, and proposed to allow the people of each State and Territory to choose for themselves whether they would or would not have it. Its candidates were Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for President, and Herschel V. Johnson ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... would stand by me under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and shield me against all its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading."—SIR WM. HERSCHEL. ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... amused interest, for he was the man who congratulated his fellows in a Liverpool debating society that while they had just lost the terra firma of thirteen colonies in America, they had gained, under the generalship of Dr. Herschel, a terra incognita of much greater extent in nubibus. Priestley not only began his experiments without any great store of knowledge, but also without apparatus save what he devised for himself of the cheapest materials. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... many great men of science who have proved efficient men of business. We do not learn that Sir Isaac Newton made a worse Master of the Mint because he was the greatest of philosophers. Nor were there any complaints as to the efficiency of Sir John Herschel, who held the same office. The brothers Humboldt were alike capable men in all that they undertook—whether it was literature, philosophy, mining, philology, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... taste for reading and the means of gratifying it," says Sir John Herschel,[1] "and you can hardly fail to make him a happy man, you place him in contact with the best society of every period of history—the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest and the purest characters that adorn humanity." ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... or Herschel, or Fulton, or Ericcson had violated axioms and laws of mathematics and dynamics, their labors would have been as so much chaff and dust. War is mechanism and science, inspiration and rule; a genuine staff for an army is a scientific law, and if this law is not ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... a focus on the same side as that on which the object itself is. From this follows the most striking difference in the method of using refracting and reflecting telescopes. In the refractor the observer looks toward the object; in the reflector he looks away from it. Sir William Herschel made his great discoveries with his back to the sky. He used reflecting telescopes. This principle, again, can be readily illustrated by means of our simple experiment with a reading glass and a magnifying mirror. Hold the reading glass between the eye and a distant object with ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... trivial were liable to cause them equal indignation. According to Livingstone, the ignorant followers of Potgieter—who were posted at Magaliesberg, a thousand miles from the Cape—were moved to wrath merely by the arrival of Herschel's great telescope at the Cape Observatory! What right, said they, had the Government to erect that huge instrument at the Cape for the purpose of seeing what they were ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up by his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection for astronomy, he continued ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist than a journey in distant countries. It both sharpens and partly allays that want and craving, which, as Sir J. Herschel remarks, a man experiences although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied. The excitement from the novelty of objects, and the chance of success, stimulate him to increased activity. Moreover, as a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... but, alas! I have been misunderstood from the day of my birth. I used to sit and study the heavens before I could walk, and my nurse, a wise and shrewd woman, predicted that I should become a great astronomer; but instead of the works of Herschel being put into my hands, I was satiated with the vilest comic toy books, and deluged with the frivolous nursery literature now happily a thing of the past. At odd times my old leaning towards serious reflection and ambition for high art come over me, but there is a fatality ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... placed by Sir John Herschel[119] at the head of his Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy: a book containing notions of discovery far beyond any of which Bacon ever dreamed; and this because it was written {81} after discovery, instead of before. Sir John Herschel, in his version, has avoided the translation ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... books—give me ever more books, for they are the caskets wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity—words, the only things that live forever! I bow reverently to the bust in yonder corner whenever I recall what Sir John Herschel (God rest his dear soul!) said and wrote: "Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of some twenty-five men killed and wounded, held on to the heights which command the river. A week or ten days were spent in pacifying the large north-eastern portion of Cape Colony, to which Aliwal acts as a centre. Barkly East, Herschel, Lady Grey, and other villages were visited by small detachments of the colonial horsemen, who pushed forward also into the south-eastern portion of the Free State, passing through Rouxville, and so along the Basutoland border as far as Wepener. The rebellion in the Colony was now absolutely ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a large meteor was observed in broad daylight, passing from south to north, and falling it was supposed, about twenty miles south of Ballater. Mr. A. S. Herschel, Professor of Physics in the College of Science, 'Newcastle-on-Tyne, published a letter in The Scotsmam, intimating his desire to be informed of the particulars of the meteor's flight by those who had seen it. As I was one of those who had observed the splendid meteor flash northwards almost ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... disadvantage. If we observe cases just as we find them, there is much present that is irrelevant to our problem; much that is of genuine importance in its solution is hidden or obscure. In experimental investigation we are, in the words of Sir John Herschel, "active observers"; we deliberately invent crucial or test cases. That is, we deliberately arrange conditions so that every factor is definitely known and recognized. We then introduce into this set of completely known conditions one change, one new circumstance, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... arithmetic, and try to solve the problems of Euclid as though he had them at his finger-ends. If he has read the "Child's Astronomy," he will walk with you through the starry heavens and the university of worlds, with as much confidence as though he was a Ross or a Herschel. He labours at the sublime and brings forth the ridiculous. He is a giant according to his own rule of measurement, but a pigmy according to that of other people. He thinks that he makes a deep impression upon the company ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... somewhat nearer to a state of actual existence than any of its unborn brethren, since I have yet a great store of notes and memoranda gathered for its construction in earlier years. My other works, such as the great treatise on Astronomical Delusions—which Herschel and La Place afterward rendered unnecessary—and the "History of the Dutch in America," never even progressed to this point of preparation. I mention this to show that I resist a genuine temptation now in deciding not to put into this narrative a great deal about my experiences in, and information ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... plain, easy, and obvious, that it will seem almost wonderful, that the Epistle has never been considered in the same light, till now. I do not wish to dazzle with the lustre of a new hypothesis, which requires, I think, neither the strong opticks, nor powerful glasses, of a critical Herschel, to ascertain the truth of it; but is a system, that lies level to common apprehension, and a luminary, discoverable by ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... lacking privileges, they took the places they could fill. Sister Dora never questioned whether she ought to bind up the wounds of her crushed workmen: she laid them on the beds of her hospital, and calmly healed them. Caroline Herschel did not stop to ask whether her telescope were privileged to find new stars, but swept it across the heavens, and was the first discoverer of at least five comets. A great obstacle in the way of advancement to girls comes from the coarse mannerism ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... ourselves any clear idea of a world to which Newton's principle was unknown. It would be almost as easy to realize the idea of a world without {273} light or atmosphere. Newton is called by Sir David Brewster the greatest philosopher of any age. Sir John Herschel assigns to the name of Newton "a place in our veneration which belongs to no other in the annals of science." In this book we have only to record the date at which the pure and simple life of this great man ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... occasionally to princes, on a salary of one thousand florins for life. He is now the chosen companion of the great, and the admiration of Italy. He has rendered an immense service to astronomy. "His discovery of the satellites of Jupiter," says Herschel, "gave the holding turn to the opinion of mankind respecting the Copernican system, and pointed out a connection between ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Modern Painters. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was "in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall"? {8} When Tennyson wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not developed, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the eighteenth century, mankind were acquainted with all the major planets except Neptune. Uranus, the last of the group, was discovered by the Elder Herschel, on the night of the thirteenth of March, 1781. True, this planet had been seen on twenty different occasions, by other observers; but its character had not been revealed. Sir William called his new world Georgium ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... at home and the application of it to civil life, there was a field to employ all the vigour of a race capable of rising to its opportunities. There is no need to remind this generation of such names as Stephenson and Herschel, Darwin and Huxley, Faraday and Kelvin; they are in no danger of being forgotten to-day. The men of letters take relatively a less conspicuous place in the evolution of the Age; but the force which they ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... under a colonial officer, General Brabant. This took its direction to the eastward of the easternmost railway system, midway between it and the Basutoland boundary, traversing the mountainous region in which lay the districts of Cape Colony, Herschel, Aliwal North, etc., that early in the war had been annexed by proclamation of the President of the Free State. After crossing the Orange, this division continued to skirt the Basuto line by Rouxville and Wepener, thus ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... the globe from a little catapult; sometimes the globe attracted the ball to its surface, and held it there, sometimes it missed it, but altered its curve of motion through the air. So was it, said the lecturer, with meteorites when they neared the earth. Photographs from drawings, by Professor A. Herschel, of the paths of meteors as seen by night were projected on the screen; they all seemed to emanate from one radiant point, which, said the lecturer, is a proof that their motions are parallel to each other; the parallel lines ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... possess strangely contradictory properties. It is commonly regarded as an "ether" or infinitely rare substance; but, as Professor Jevons observes, we might as well regard it as an infinitely solid "adamant." "Sir John Herschel has calculated the amount of force which may be supposed, according to the undulatory theory of light, to be exerted at each point in space, and finds it to be 1,148,000,000,000 times the elastic force of ordinary air at the earth's surface, so that the pressure of the ether upon a square ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... restored. On reassembling this was found impossible, and the balloting was resumed, which finally gave Mr. Douglas all the votes cast but thirteen, and he was declared the Democratic nominee. The Convention then nominated for the Vice Presidency Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia, a disciple of Calhoun, whose extreme opinions were well known. He was unequivocally committed to the doctrine that neither the General Government nor a Territorial Government ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... this came the Boer enclave round Colesberg, the extent of which was being much diminished by General French's operations. Further east again, the north-east angle of the colony, including the districts of Herschel, Aliwal North, Barkly East, Wodehouse, and Albert, had for the time being become de facto Free State territory. Kruger telegraphed to Steyn on the 20th of December: "I and the rest of the War Commission decide that every ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... figure and brightness. Some of them have a nebulous or cloudy appearance; and there are entire clusters with this dusky aspect, mostly pervaded, however, with luminous points of more brilliant hue. In the outer fields of astral space Sir WILLIAM HERSCHEL observed a multitude of nebulae, one or two of which may be seen by the naked eye. All of them, when seen by instruments of low power, look like masses of luminous vapour; but some of them had brighter spots, suggesting to Sir ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Academicians. Of his collected works in fourteen volumes, 'Oeuvres de Francois Arago,' published in Paris, 1865, three volumes are given to these 'Notices Biographiques.' Here may be found the biographies of Bailly, Sir William Herschel, Laplace, Joseph Fourier, Carnot, Malus, Fresnel, Thomas Young, and James Watt; which, translated rather carelessly into English, have been published under the title 'Biographies of Distinguished Men,' and can be found in the larger libraries. The collected works contain biographies ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... seems to be another municipal dust-bin—no, it is a model of a school of art and public library. This little lead figure is Mrs. Hemans, a poetess, and this is Rowland Hill, who introduced the system of penny postage. This is Sir John Herschel, the ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... grains, and the mass becomes unfit for the purposes of the manufacturer. I am indebted for this interesting fact, which, I believe, is well known in some of the potteries, to my friend Mr. Arthur Aikin. And Mr. Herschel informs me, that a similar change takes place in recently precipitated carbonate of copper; which, if left long moist, concretes into hard gritty grains, of a green colour, much more difficultly soluble in ammonia than ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... points of the solar spectrum are represented in the order in which they occur between A, and B, this exhibits the limits of the Newtonian spectrum, corresponding with Fig. 1. Sir John Herschel and Seebeck have shown that there exists, beyond the violet, a faint violet light, or rather a lavender to b, to which gradually becomes colorless; similarly, red light exists beyond the assigned limits of the red ray to a. The greatest amount of actinic power is shown at E opposite the violet; ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey |
