MacTutor
John Herschel
Times obituary
European science has lost one of its illustrious members in the person of Sir John Herschel, whose death we recorded briefly in our columns yesterday, at the age of 79.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, F.R.S., & was the son of that eminent astronomer, Sir William, Herschel, who just 90 years since discovered the Georgian Sidus, or Uranus, as it was called at first, but which is now known by the name of its discoverer—the planet Herschel. His mother was Mary, daughter of Mr. Adee Baldwin, and he was himself born at Slough, Buckinghamshire, on the 7th of March, 1792. He received his early education privately, under a Scotch mathematician named Rogers, from whose hands he passed to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1813, emerging as Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman. In the same year he published his first work, A Collection of Examples of the Application of the Calculus to Finite Differences In 1819 he commenced a series of papers in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal on miscellaneous subjects in physical science, and in 1822 communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper on the absorption of light by coloured media, which will be found in the ninth volume of the Transactions of that society. He spent a great part of the years 1821-1823, in conjunction with the late Sir James South, in making a number of observations on the distances and positions of numerous stars, a full account of which is to be seen in Part III of the Philosophical Transactions for 1824. In the following year he began to re-examine the numerous nodes and clusters of stars which had been discovered by his father. He was employed on this work for eight years, and its results will be found in the volume of the above-mentioned work for 1832. The catalog includes upwards of 2,300 nebulae, of which 525 were discovered by Sir John himself. It may be added that while engaged upon this work, he also discovered between three and four thousand double stars, which are described in the Memoirs of the Astronomical Society. These observations were made with an excellent Newtonian telescope, 20 feet in focal length and 185 inches in diameter; and "having obtained," to use his own words, "a sufficient mastery over the instrument," he conceived the idea of using it in the survey of the southern heavens. Accordingly, he left England in November 1833 and reaching the Cape in January 1834, fixing his residence in the neighborhood of Table Bay. There he set up his instruments and was shortly able to begin a regular course of sweepings of the southern heavens.
His observations were continued until May 1838, the whole of the expense attending them being borne by Herschel himself. The interest felt by the scientific world of Europe and America in the progress of his labours was very great, and, from time to time, curiosity was gratified by accounts of some of the observations conveyed to friends by letter; but it was not until 1847, some years after his return to England, that the collected digested results of his four years' residence at the Cape were published in regular form, when he published his volume entitled Results of Astronomical Observations made during 1884-38 at the Cape of Good Hope; being the Completion of a Telescopic Survey of the Whole Surface of the Visible Heavens, commenced in 1825. Although the astronomer's main object in the southern hemisphere, as in the northern hemisphere, had been the detection of new nebulas and the re-examination of old ones, his observations extended themselves so as to include all the objects for which his position was favourable. Indeed, not only was a mass of new observations appropriate to the southern heavens added to astronomical science by the survey, but many of the extreme speculations of the older Herschel and others relative to the highest problems of astronomy were reviewed afresh in the light of the new observations. The substance of these has since been incorporated into all the more recent works of general astronomy. Besides his astronomical work at the Cape, he was always ready to give the colonial authorities his advice and aid on scientific and educational matters. It is to him that the Cape colonists are mainly indebted for the very perfect system of national education and public schools which they now enjoy, and which he was enabled to carry on through the sagacity and liberality of the late Sir George Napier, at that time Governor, and of his Colonial Secretary, Mr. Henry Montagu.
It is worthy of remark, says a writer in the English Cyclopædia, that Herschel's residence at the Cape was prolific of benefits not only to astronomy but also to geology. While occupied there, he suggested a plan of having meteorological observations made simultaneously at different places—a plan subsequently developed at greater length in his Instructions for Making and Registering Meteorological Observations at Various Stations in Southern Africa, issued under official military authority in 1844. He had already received from the bands of King William IV the Hanoverian Guelphic Order of Knighthood, and on his return to England in 1838 he was received with every possible public honour. During his absence in the southern hemisphere the Astronomical Society voted to award him their Gold Medal in 1836. Two weeks later, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Victoria, he was created a baronet. In 1839 he was awarded an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford University, and there was a proposal, which he declined, to elect him to succeed the late Duke of Sussex in the presidential chair of the Royal Society. In 1842 he was elected Lord Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1818 he was President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in the same year the society voted him a testimonial for his work on the southern hemisphere. Having by that time completed the digest and publication of his observations at the Cape, during the preparation of which, however, he had published various incidental papers in the Transactions of the Astronomical Society, he was free to carry out other work. Of these the most important of a literary kind was his work entitled Outlines of Astronomy (enlarged from his former treatise in Lardner's Cyclopædia), which he published in 1849. In the same year he edited a collection of papers by various authors, published by authority, and entitled A Manual of Scientific Inquiry, prepared for the use of Her Majesty's Navy, and adapted for Travellers in general. In December 1830, when the Mastership of the Mint was converted from a Ministerial into a permanent office, it was conferred upon Sir John Herschel, and this post was retained by him until 1855, when he resigned it on account of ill-health, and Professor Graham, the eminent chemist, appointed his successor.
Sir John Herschel was the author of the articles on "Iso-perimetrical Problonis" and "Mathematics" in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and of "Meteorology" and "Physical Geography" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (the last two of which have been republished separately), and also of several articles on scientific subjects in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, which were collected and published in a separate form in 1857, together with some of his lectures and addresses delivered on public occasions. He also occasionally contributed to Good Words some popular papers on the wonders of the universe; and so two or three years ago he gave to the world, in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine, a practical version of part of the Inferno of Daute. He was also one of the numerous translators of Homer. Sir John Herschel was an honorary or corresponding member of the Academies of St. Petersburg, Vienna, Göttingen, Turin, Bologna, Brussels, Naples, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and of almost all other scientific associations in England and America. To his other honours was added that of Chevalier of the Prussian Order of Merit, founded by Frederick the Great, and given at the recommendation of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. We regret that the limited space at our disposal prohibits us from giving a more detailed account of the scientific labours of Sir John Herschel. Many philosophers of an age who have produced a Faraday and Brewster hare attained a distinction equal to that which he earned for himself. His mathematical acquisitions and his discoveries in astronomy, optics, chemistry, and photography were all of a very high order, and such, aided by an admirable style, secured for him the widest reputation among men of science, both at home and abroad. while his numerous popular writings have largely contributed to the diffusion of a taste for science and an acquaintance with its principles among our countrymen.
Sir John Herschel married in 1829 Margaret Brodie, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Stewart, by whom he had a family of nine daughters and three sons. One of the former is married to General Alexander Gordon, uncle of the present Lord Aberdeen, and now heir presumptive to that title. His youngest son is an officer in the Royal Bengal Engineers. He is succeeded in the title by his son, Mr. William James Herschel, of the Bengal Civil Service, who was born in 1833 and married in 1864 Mina Anne Emma Haldane Hardcastle, daughter of the late Mr. Alfred Hardcastle, of Hatcham, Surrey.
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FUNERAL OF SIR JOHN HERSCHEL.
In the year 1822, the elder Herschel was buried in the little church of Upton, near Slough; and now, after an interval of nearly half a century, the body of his scarcely less distinguished son has just been publicly consigned to its last resting place in Westminster Abbey. Sir John Herschel's funeral was celebrated yesterday with a full choral service, in the presence of a large circle of attached friends, nearly all the men of science of the day, and a numerous assemblage of the public who filled the sides and west end of the nave. At 12 o'clock the body, which had arrived by railway from Kent half an hour before at the Charing Cross Station, in a funeral attended by a single mourning coach, was carried into the nave by the cloister entrance while the choir, accompanying the organ, sang the well-known hymn beginning "I know that my Redeemer liveth." The procession having wound its way up the nave and reached the sacrarium, the coffin, which was of plain polished wood, was placed on trostles before the alter. The lesson (from the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians) was read by Archdeacon Jennings. The remaining portion of the service was sung at the grave by the choir, except for the part read by the Dean, and it concluded with the anthem of Handel, "His body is buried in peace; but His name liveth for evermore." The Dean gave the final blessing. The Canons present on the occasion were Canon Nepean, Canon Jennings, and Canon Protheroe, and the whole bed of Minor Canons attended. The grave is at the eastern end of the north shore, near to the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, under the painted window recently erected to Robert Stephenson, and at the foot of the monument to Lord Livingston. The pallbearers were the Duke of Devonshire, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; M. le Duc de Broglie, Member of the Institute of France; Mr. George B. Airey, the Astronomer-Royal; General Sir Edward Sabine, President of the Royal Society; Sir Charles Lyell; Mr. William Lassell, President of the Royal Astronomical Society; Sir Henry Holland, President of the Royal Institution; and Sir John Lubbock. The list of mourners included Mr. A.S. Herschell, chief mourner; General the Hon. A. Gordon, Mr. Reginald Marshall, Mr. John Stewart, Messrs. Edward and Henry Hardcastle; Mr. William Spottiswoode, Dr. Parry, Bishop Suffragan of Dover; Mr. H. C. Morland, Mr. J. P. Gassiot, Colonel Strange, Mr. G. R. Waterhouse, the Rev. Charles Pritchard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy; Mr. J. H. Nelson, Mr. A. Beresford-Hope, M.P., Professor Tyndall, Professor Owen, Professor Adams, the Rev. J. Jeffreys, and Sir Charles Whentatone. Among those also present in the Abbey on the mournful occasion were Sir John Bowring, Mr. Charles Darwin, the Dean of Salisbury, Messrs. Norman Lockyor, M. D. Conway, and Warren De la Rue, Professor Sylvester, Lady Augusta Stanley, and several other ladies, and a large number of men celebrated in every department of science. The funeral arrangements were under the control of Messrs. Banting of St. James's Street, and the mournful caremony was brought to a conclusion shortly after 1 o'clock.
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Dean Stanley preached a funeral sermon yesterday afternoon in Westminster Minster Abbey on Sir John Herschel, taking for a text the 14th and 15th verses of the First Chapter of Genesis: "And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of Heaven to divide the day from the night; and let then be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of Heaven to give light upon the earth; and it was so." The preacher showed how the poetic firo and glorious imagery of the Sacred Writings had tended to direct attention to the wonders of the universe, to stimulate inquiry, and to develop the "grand curiosity of the age." That miserable antagonism which later ages had imagined between religion and science had no place in those memorable records; that unnatural civil war which in modern times had been waged under the opposing flags of faith and reason would have had no meaning to the minds of the primitive philosophers. Passing to the labours of the departed astronomer and his triumphs in the work of discovery he had undertaken, and, often quoting from his writings, the Dean found lessons on the duty of humility—equally needed, he said, by the students of theology and natural science, and equally instigated by both. The character of the true philosopher was to hold all things not impossiblo, and to believe all things not unreasonable Why should we, despair of the reason which had enabled us, why should we subdue all nature to our purposes being competent, if permitted by the providence of God, to achieve the far more difficult work of enabling the collective wisdom of mankind to bear down the obstacles which individual short-sightedness, selfishness, and passion opposed to all improvisation? Especially did the preacher commend to his hearers the vow made by Illcrachul and some of his college friends that each would strive to do his utmost to leave the world better than he found it. The sermon, which occupied 55 minutes in delivery, was listened to with rapt attention by the large congregation who filled the choir and thronged the tenor sirs, and of whom a largo nunber were obliged to stand throughout the service. The elocutionary sound, his clear enunciation, and steady, sustained tones enabled him, without any appearance of fatigue, to make himself distinctly heard by those who were furthest from him, until in his last two sentences he lowered the pitch of his voice. The prayers were intoned and the lessons were read respectively by the precontor, the Rev. S. Flood Jones and the late Frederick Kill Harford, minor canons of West-Rev. Minster. The anthems, very appropriately selected, were Spohr's exquisite quartetto and chorus, "Blest are the departed when in the Lord are sleeping, from henceforth for evermore; they rest from their labours, and their works follow them," sung before the sermon; and, for a second anthem, Haydn's musio, the to words and a portion of the 19th Psalm introducing the familiar air, "The heavens are telling the glory of God." Attwood's service in O, the anthoms, and the "Dead March" in Saul were played by the assistant organist, Mr. Jekyll, in the absence of Mr. Turle.
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The following is the memorial in accordance with which Sir John Herschel was interred in the Abbey:
"We, the undersigned, holding in view and entertaining a deep sense of the eminent services rendered to physical science in this country by the genius and labours of the late Sir John Herschel during a period of more than half a century, are of the opinion that his memory ought to be honored by an interment at Westminster today, and we pray the Dean of Westminster to give the two nominative authorization for this purpose: Devonshire, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; Salisbury, Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Edward Sabine, President of the Royal Society; G. B. Airy, Astronomer Royal; William Lassell, President of the Royal Astronomical Society; Henry Holland, President of the Royal Society; William Spottiswood, President of the Institute; President of the Mathematical Society; Charles Lyell, F.R.S.; W R. Grove, F.R.S.; John Tyndall, F.R.S.; Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society; Joha Lubbock F.R.S.; Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S.; Spencer H. Walpole, M.P. for the University of Cambridge; H. Beresford Hope, M.R. for the Waiversity of Cambridge,"
European science has lost one of its illustrious members in the person of Sir John Herschel, whose death we recorded briefly in our columns yesterday, at the age of 79.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, F.R.S., & was the son of that eminent astronomer, Sir William, Herschel, who just 90 years since discovered the Georgian Sidus, or Uranus, as it was called at first, but which is now known by the name of its discoverer—the planet Herschel. His mother was Mary, daughter of Mr. Adee Baldwin, and he was himself born at Slough, Buckinghamshire, on the 7th of March, 1792. He received his early education privately, under a Scotch mathematician named Rogers, from whose hands he passed to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1813, emerging as Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman. In the same year he published his first work, A Collection of Examples of the Application of the Calculus to Finite Differences In 1819 he commenced a series of papers in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal on miscellaneous subjects in physical science, and in 1822 communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper on the absorption of light by coloured media, which will be found in the ninth volume of the Transactions of that society. He spent a great part of the years 1821-1823, in conjunction with the late Sir James South, in making a number of observations on the distances and positions of numerous stars, a full account of which is to be seen in Part III of the Philosophical Transactions for 1824. In the following year he began to re-examine the numerous nodes and clusters of stars which had been discovered by his father. He was employed on this work for eight years, and its results will be found in the volume of the above-mentioned work for 1832. The catalog includes upwards of 2,300 nebulae, of which 525 were discovered by Sir John himself. It may be added that while engaged upon this work, he also discovered between three and four thousand double stars, which are described in the Memoirs of the Astronomical Society. These observations were made with an excellent Newtonian telescope, 20 feet in focal length and 185 inches in diameter; and "having obtained," to use his own words, "a sufficient mastery over the instrument," he conceived the idea of using it in the survey of the southern heavens. Accordingly, he left England in November 1833 and reaching the Cape in January 1834, fixing his residence in the neighborhood of Table Bay. There he set up his instruments and was shortly able to begin a regular course of sweepings of the southern heavens.
His observations were continued until May 1838, the whole of the expense attending them being borne by Herschel himself. The interest felt by the scientific world of Europe and America in the progress of his labours was very great, and, from time to time, curiosity was gratified by accounts of some of the observations conveyed to friends by letter; but it was not until 1847, some years after his return to England, that the collected digested results of his four years' residence at the Cape were published in regular form, when he published his volume entitled Results of Astronomical Observations made during 1884-38 at the Cape of Good Hope; being the Completion of a Telescopic Survey of the Whole Surface of the Visible Heavens, commenced in 1825. Although the astronomer's main object in the southern hemisphere, as in the northern hemisphere, had been the detection of new nebulas and the re-examination of old ones, his observations extended themselves so as to include all the objects for which his position was favourable. Indeed, not only was a mass of new observations appropriate to the southern heavens added to astronomical science by the survey, but many of the extreme speculations of the older Herschel and others relative to the highest problems of astronomy were reviewed afresh in the light of the new observations. The substance of these has since been incorporated into all the more recent works of general astronomy. Besides his astronomical work at the Cape, he was always ready to give the colonial authorities his advice and aid on scientific and educational matters. It is to him that the Cape colonists are mainly indebted for the very perfect system of national education and public schools which they now enjoy, and which he was enabled to carry on through the sagacity and liberality of the late Sir George Napier, at that time Governor, and of his Colonial Secretary, Mr. Henry Montagu.
It is worthy of remark, says a writer in the English Cyclopædia, that Herschel's residence at the Cape was prolific of benefits not only to astronomy but also to geology. While occupied there, he suggested a plan of having meteorological observations made simultaneously at different places—a plan subsequently developed at greater length in his Instructions for Making and Registering Meteorological Observations at Various Stations in Southern Africa, issued under official military authority in 1844. He had already received from the bands of King William IV the Hanoverian Guelphic Order of Knighthood, and on his return to England in 1838 he was received with every possible public honour. During his absence in the southern hemisphere the Astronomical Society voted to award him their Gold Medal in 1836. Two weeks later, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Victoria, he was created a baronet. In 1839 he was awarded an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford University, and there was a proposal, which he declined, to elect him to succeed the late Duke of Sussex in the presidential chair of the Royal Society. In 1842 he was elected Lord Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1818 he was President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in the same year the society voted him a testimonial for his work on the southern hemisphere. Having by that time completed the digest and publication of his observations at the Cape, during the preparation of which, however, he had published various incidental papers in the Transactions of the Astronomical Society, he was free to carry out other work. Of these the most important of a literary kind was his work entitled Outlines of Astronomy (enlarged from his former treatise in Lardner's Cyclopædia), which he published in 1849. In the same year he edited a collection of papers by various authors, published by authority, and entitled A Manual of Scientific Inquiry, prepared for the use of Her Majesty's Navy, and adapted for Travellers in general. In December 1830, when the Mastership of the Mint was converted from a Ministerial into a permanent office, it was conferred upon Sir John Herschel, and this post was retained by him until 1855, when he resigned it on account of ill-health, and Professor Graham, the eminent chemist, appointed his successor.
Sir John Herschel was the author of the articles on "Iso-perimetrical Problonis" and "Mathematics" in the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and of "Meteorology" and "Physical Geography" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (the last two of which have been republished separately), and also of several articles on scientific subjects in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, which were collected and published in a separate form in 1857, together with some of his lectures and addresses delivered on public occasions. He also occasionally contributed to Good Words some popular papers on the wonders of the universe; and so two or three years ago he gave to the world, in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine, a practical version of part of the Inferno of Daute. He was also one of the numerous translators of Homer. Sir John Herschel was an honorary or corresponding member of the Academies of St. Petersburg, Vienna, Göttingen, Turin, Bologna, Brussels, Naples, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and of almost all other scientific associations in England and America. To his other honours was added that of Chevalier of the Prussian Order of Merit, founded by Frederick the Great, and given at the recommendation of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. We regret that the limited space at our disposal prohibits us from giving a more detailed account of the scientific labours of Sir John Herschel. Many philosophers of an age who have produced a Faraday and Brewster hare attained a distinction equal to that which he earned for himself. His mathematical acquisitions and his discoveries in astronomy, optics, chemistry, and photography were all of a very high order, and such, aided by an admirable style, secured for him the widest reputation among men of science, both at home and abroad. while his numerous popular writings have largely contributed to the diffusion of a taste for science and an acquaintance with its principles among our countrymen.
Sir John Herschel married in 1829 Margaret Brodie, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Stewart, by whom he had a family of nine daughters and three sons. One of the former is married to General Alexander Gordon, uncle of the present Lord Aberdeen, and now heir presumptive to that title. His youngest son is an officer in the Royal Bengal Engineers. He is succeeded in the title by his son, Mr. William James Herschel, of the Bengal Civil Service, who was born in 1833 and married in 1864 Mina Anne Emma Haldane Hardcastle, daughter of the late Mr. Alfred Hardcastle, of Hatcham, Surrey.
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FUNERAL OF SIR JOHN HERSCHEL.
In the year 1822, the elder Herschel was buried in the little church of Upton, near Slough; and now, after an interval of nearly half a century, the body of his scarcely less distinguished son has just been publicly consigned to its last resting place in Westminster Abbey. Sir John Herschel's funeral was celebrated yesterday with a full choral service, in the presence of a large circle of attached friends, nearly all the men of science of the day, and a numerous assemblage of the public who filled the sides and west end of the nave. At 12 o'clock the body, which had arrived by railway from Kent half an hour before at the Charing Cross Station, in a funeral attended by a single mourning coach, was carried into the nave by the cloister entrance while the choir, accompanying the organ, sang the well-known hymn beginning "I know that my Redeemer liveth." The procession having wound its way up the nave and reached the sacrarium, the coffin, which was of plain polished wood, was placed on trostles before the alter. The lesson (from the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians) was read by Archdeacon Jennings. The remaining portion of the service was sung at the grave by the choir, except for the part read by the Dean, and it concluded with the anthem of Handel, "His body is buried in peace; but His name liveth for evermore." The Dean gave the final blessing. The Canons present on the occasion were Canon Nepean, Canon Jennings, and Canon Protheroe, and the whole bed of Minor Canons attended. The grave is at the eastern end of the north shore, near to the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, under the painted window recently erected to Robert Stephenson, and at the foot of the monument to Lord Livingston. The pallbearers were the Duke of Devonshire, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; M. le Duc de Broglie, Member of the Institute of France; Mr. George B. Airey, the Astronomer-Royal; General Sir Edward Sabine, President of the Royal Society; Sir Charles Lyell; Mr. William Lassell, President of the Royal Astronomical Society; Sir Henry Holland, President of the Royal Institution; and Sir John Lubbock. The list of mourners included Mr. A.S. Herschell, chief mourner; General the Hon. A. Gordon, Mr. Reginald Marshall, Mr. John Stewart, Messrs. Edward and Henry Hardcastle; Mr. William Spottiswoode, Dr. Parry, Bishop Suffragan of Dover; Mr. H. C. Morland, Mr. J. P. Gassiot, Colonel Strange, Mr. G. R. Waterhouse, the Rev. Charles Pritchard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy; Mr. J. H. Nelson, Mr. A. Beresford-Hope, M.P., Professor Tyndall, Professor Owen, Professor Adams, the Rev. J. Jeffreys, and Sir Charles Whentatone. Among those also present in the Abbey on the mournful occasion were Sir John Bowring, Mr. Charles Darwin, the Dean of Salisbury, Messrs. Norman Lockyor, M. D. Conway, and Warren De la Rue, Professor Sylvester, Lady Augusta Stanley, and several other ladies, and a large number of men celebrated in every department of science. The funeral arrangements were under the control of Messrs. Banting of St. James's Street, and the mournful caremony was brought to a conclusion shortly after 1 o'clock.
_________________________________________________________
Dean Stanley preached a funeral sermon yesterday afternoon in Westminster Minster Abbey on Sir John Herschel, taking for a text the 14th and 15th verses of the First Chapter of Genesis: "And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of Heaven to divide the day from the night; and let then be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of Heaven to give light upon the earth; and it was so." The preacher showed how the poetic firo and glorious imagery of the Sacred Writings had tended to direct attention to the wonders of the universe, to stimulate inquiry, and to develop the "grand curiosity of the age." That miserable antagonism which later ages had imagined between religion and science had no place in those memorable records; that unnatural civil war which in modern times had been waged under the opposing flags of faith and reason would have had no meaning to the minds of the primitive philosophers. Passing to the labours of the departed astronomer and his triumphs in the work of discovery he had undertaken, and, often quoting from his writings, the Dean found lessons on the duty of humility—equally needed, he said, by the students of theology and natural science, and equally instigated by both. The character of the true philosopher was to hold all things not impossiblo, and to believe all things not unreasonable Why should we, despair of the reason which had enabled us, why should we subdue all nature to our purposes being competent, if permitted by the providence of God, to achieve the far more difficult work of enabling the collective wisdom of mankind to bear down the obstacles which individual short-sightedness, selfishness, and passion opposed to all improvisation? Especially did the preacher commend to his hearers the vow made by Illcrachul and some of his college friends that each would strive to do his utmost to leave the world better than he found it. The sermon, which occupied 55 minutes in delivery, was listened to with rapt attention by the large congregation who filled the choir and thronged the tenor sirs, and of whom a largo nunber were obliged to stand throughout the service. The elocutionary sound, his clear enunciation, and steady, sustained tones enabled him, without any appearance of fatigue, to make himself distinctly heard by those who were furthest from him, until in his last two sentences he lowered the pitch of his voice. The prayers were intoned and the lessons were read respectively by the precontor, the Rev. S. Flood Jones and the late Frederick Kill Harford, minor canons of West-Rev. Minster. The anthems, very appropriately selected, were Spohr's exquisite quartetto and chorus, "Blest are the departed when in the Lord are sleeping, from henceforth for evermore; they rest from their labours, and their works follow them," sung before the sermon; and, for a second anthem, Haydn's musio, the to words and a portion of the 19th Psalm introducing the familiar air, "The heavens are telling the glory of God." Attwood's service in O, the anthoms, and the "Dead March" in Saul were played by the assistant organist, Mr. Jekyll, in the absence of Mr. Turle.
_____________________________________________________
The following is the memorial in accordance with which Sir John Herschel was interred in the Abbey:
"We, the undersigned, holding in view and entertaining a deep sense of the eminent services rendered to physical science in this country by the genius and labours of the late Sir John Herschel during a period of more than half a century, are of the opinion that his memory ought to be honored by an interment at Westminster today, and we pray the Dean of Westminster to give the two nominative authorization for this purpose: Devonshire, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; Salisbury, Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Edward Sabine, President of the Royal Society; G. B. Airy, Astronomer Royal; William Lassell, President of the Royal Astronomical Society; Henry Holland, President of the Royal Society; William Spottiswood, President of the Institute; President of the Mathematical Society; Charles Lyell, F.R.S.; W R. Grove, F.R.S.; John Tyndall, F.R.S.; Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society; Joha Lubbock F.R.S.; Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S.; Spencer H. Walpole, M.P. for the University of Cambridge; H. Beresford Hope, M.R. for the Waiversity of Cambridge,"
