g, were necessary to work out the remote
consequences of known laws, but nothing fresh seemed likely to turn up.
Consequently men's minds began turning in other directions, and we find
chemistry and optics largely studied by some of the greatest minds,
instead of astronomy.

But before the century closed there was destined to arise one remarkable
exception--a man who was comparatively ignorant of that which had been
done before--a man unversed in mathematics and the intricacies of
science, but who possessed such a real and genuine enthusiasm and love
of Nature that he overcame the force of adverse circumstances, and
entering the territory of astronomy by a by-path, struck out a new line
for himself, and infused into the science a healthy spirit of fresh life
and activity.

This man was William Herschel.

"The rise of Herschel," says Miss Clerke, "is the one conspicuous
anomaly in the otherwise somewhat quiet and prosy eighteenth century. It
proved decisive of the course of events in the nineteenth. It was
unexplained by anything that had gone before, yet all that came after
hinged upon it. It gave a new direction to effort; it lent a fresh
impulse to thought. It opened a channel for the widespread public
interest which was gathering towards astronomical subjects to flow in."

Herschel was born at Hanover in 1738, the son of an oboe player in a
military regiment. The father was a good musician, and a cultivated man.
The mother was a German _Frau_ of the period, a strong, active,
business-like woman, of strong character and profound ignorance. Herself
unable to write, she set her face against learning and all new-fangled
notions. The education of the sons she could not altogether control,
though she lamented over it, but the education of her two daughters she
strictly limited to cooking, sewing, and household management. These,
however, she taught them well.

It was a large family, and William was the fourth child. We need only
remember the names of his younger brother Alexander, and of his much
younger sister Caroline.

They were all very musical--the youngest boy was once raised upon a
table to play the violin at a public performance. The girls were
forbidden to learn music by their mother, but their father sometimes
taught them a little on the sly. Alexander was besides an ingenious
mechanician.

At the age of seventeen, William became oboist to the Hanoverian Guards,
shortly before the regiment was ordered to