lege, and rejoiced at the
brilliant ease with which he passed every examination. In 1813 he took
his degree of B.A., and consummated a long series of successes by
becoming "senior wrangler," and "Smith's prizeman;" these being the two
highest distinctions to which a Cambridge scholar can attain.

In the same year, when he was hardly twenty-one, he published a work
entitled, "A Collection of Examples of the Application of the Calculus
to Finite Differences." To our young readers such a title will convey no
meaning; and we refer to it here only to illustrate the industry and
careful thought of the young student, which had rendered possible such a
result.

Returning to Slough, he continued his studies in mathematics, chemistry,
and natural philosophy, and in various publications exhibited that
faculty of observation and analyzation, that intelligence and
scrupulousness in collecting facts, and that boldness in deducing new
inferences from them, which were characteristic of his illustrious
father. The subjects he took up were so abstruse, that we could not hope
to make our readers understand what he accomplished, or how far he
excelled his predecessors in his grasp and comprehension of them. For
instance: if we tell them that in 1820 he wrote a paper "On the Theory
and Summation of Series;" communicated to the Cambridge Philosophical
Society his discovery that the two kinds of rotatory polarization in
rock crystal were related to the plagihedral faces of that mineral; and
issued an able treatise "On Certain Remarkable Instances of Deviation
from Newton's Tints in the Polarized Tints of Uniaxal Crystals,"--they
will gain no very distinct idea of the significance or value of these
researches. Again: it will not be very intelligible to them to be
informed that, in 1822, he communicated to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh a paper "On the Absorption of Light by Coloured Media", in
which he enunciated a new method of measuring the dispersion of
transparent bodies by stopping the green, yellow, and most refrangible
red rays, and thus rendering visible the rays situated rigorously at the
end of the spectrum. But they will understand that these results could
have been attained only by the most assiduous industry and the most
unflinching perseverance. And it is on account of this industry and
this perseverance that we recommend Herschel as an example to our
readers. They may not make the same progress in science, or achieve the
same