[H] The three specula of the twenty-foot are in the possession of Sir William J. Herschel; the tube remains in good preservation at Collingwood.
But it was often and in many ways interrupted. The demands on his time and thoughts were innumerable. Having settled his family for the season in London, he paid his third and last visit to his venerable aunt, and, in returning, dined with Dr. Olbers, the physician-astronomer of Bremen, then in his eightieth year. A fortnight later he was on his way to Newcastle, where the British Association met, August 20th. He was received with acclamation, but overwhelmed by scientific exactions. The proceedings were to him “a dreadful wear and tear,” and they left behind “mixed and crowded recollections.” No wonder. Besides acting as President of the Mathematical Section, he found himself involved in varied responsibilities. He was placed on a Committee for bringing down to date the places of Lacaille’s 10,000 southern stars; on another for revising stellar nomenclature. The reduction of a body of meteorological observations made on a plan of his devising was entrusted to him; above all, he was charged with the development of Humboldt’s international scheme for securing systematic and world-wide observations on terrestrial magnetism. He drew up a memorial to the Government; compiled the Instructions for Sir James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition; and elaborately reported progress at several successive meetings of the British Association. His heart was in the work. He contributed an article dwelling on its importance to the Quarterly Review for June, 1840; and in 1845 he expressed the opinion that “terrestrial physics form a subject every way worthy to be associated with astronomy as a matter of universal interest and public support.”
The constellations gave him still more trouble than the vagaries of poised needles. They were in a riot of disorder. Celestial maps had become “a system of derangement and confusion”—of confusion “worse confounded.” New asterisms carved out of old existed precariously, recognised by some, ignored by others; waste places in the sky had been annexed by encroaching astronomers as standing-ground for their glorified telescopes, quadrants, sextants, clocks; a chemical apparatus had been set up by the shore of the river Eridanus, itself a meandering and uncomfortable figure; while serpents and dragons trailed their perplexing convolutions through hour after hour of right ascension. There were constellations so large that Greek, Roman, and Italic alphabets had been used up in designating the included stars; there were others separated by debatable districts, the stars in which often duplicated those situated within the authentic form of one of the neighbouring celestial monsters. Identification was thus in numberless cases difficult; in some, impossible.
In conjunction with Francis Baily, Herschel undertook the almost hopeless task of rectifying this intolerable disorder. After much preliminary labour, he submitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1841, a drastic scheme of constellational reform—a stellar redistribution-bill, framed on radical principles. Its alarming completeness, however, caused it to be let drop; and he finally proposed, in his report of 1844 to the British Association, a less ambitious but more practicable measure. Although not adopted in its entirety, it paved the way for ameliorations. The boundaries of the constellations have since been defined; interlopers have been ejected; one—the Ship Argo—especially obnoxious for its unwieldy dimensions, has been advantageously trisected. Nevertheless, individual star-nomenclature grows continually more perplexed; partial systems have become intermingled and entangled; double stars are designated in one way, variables in another, quick-moving stars in a third, red stars in a fourth, while any one of many catalogue-numbers may be substituted at choice; palpable blunders, unsettled discrepancies, anomalies of all imaginable kinds, survive in an inextricable web of arbitrary appellations, until it has come to pass that a star has often as many aliases as an accomplished swindler.
In the spring of 1840 Herschel removed from Slough to Collingwood, a spacious country residence situated near Hawkhurst, in Kent. Here he devoted himself, in good earnest, to the preparation of his Cape results for the press. It was no light task. The transformation of simple registers of sweeps into a methodical catalogue is a long and irksome process; and Herschel was in possession of the “sweepings” of nearly four hundred nights. He executed it single-handed, being averse to the employment of paid computers. This was unfortunate. Monotonous drudgery was not at all in his line; as well put Pegasus between shafts. He had always found in himself “a great inaptitude” for numerical calculations; and he now acknowledged to Baily that attention to figures during two or three consecutive hours distressed him painfully. Whewell lamented in the Quarterly Review the lavish expenditure of his time and energy upon “mere arithmetic”—computations which a machine would have been more competent to perform than a finely organised human brain. At last, however, in November, 1842, the necessary reductions were finished; and the letterpress to accompany the catalogues of double stars and nebulæ left his hands a couple of years later. The preparation of the plates occasioned further vexatious delays; and it was not until 1847 that the monumental work entitled “Results of Astronomical Observations at the Cape of Good Hope” issued from the press. The expenses of its production were generously defrayed by the Duke of Northumberland. In sending a copy to his aunt, then in her ninety-eighth year, he wrote: “You will have in your hands the completion of my father’s work—‘The Survey of the Nebulous Heavens.’” The publication was honoured with the Copley Medal by the Royal Society, and with a special testimonial by the Astronomical Society.
Bessel, the eminent director of the Königsberg observatory, made Herschel’s personal acquaintance at the Manchester meeting of the British Association in 1842, and paid him a visit at Collingwood. The subject of a possible trans-Uranian planet was discussed between them. The German astronomer regarded its existence as certain, and disclosed the plot he had already formed for waylaying it on its remote path. The premonition stirred Herschel deeply. “There ought to be a hue and cry raised!” he exclaimed in a letter to Baily. And in resigning the Chair of the British Association, September 10, 1846, he spoke with full assurance of the still undiscovered body. “We see it,” he declared, “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.” Within a fortnight, Neptune, through Le Verrier’s indications, was captured at Berlin.
“I hope you agreed with me,” he wrote, November 19, 1846, to Sir William Hamilton, “that it is perfectly possible to do justice to Adams’s investigations without calling in question M. Le Verrier’s property in his discovery. The fact is, I apprehend, that the Frenchmen are only just beginning to be aware what a narrow escape Mr. Neptune had of being born an Englishman. Poor Adams aimed at his bird, it appears, first, and as well as Le Verrier, but his gun hung fire, and the bird dropped on the other side of the fence!”
It is well known that Le Verrier and Adams personally ignored controversy as to their respective claims to the planetary spolia opima. They were together at Collingwood in July, 1847, with Struve as their fellow-guest. During those few days King Arthur (in the person of Sir John Herschel) “sat in hall at old Caerleon.”
He was elected President of the Royal Astronomical Society for the usual biennial term in 1828, 1840, and 1847; on the last occasion through the diplomatic action of Professor De Morgan. The Society was passing through a crisis; he apprehended its dissolution, and judged that it could only be saved by getting Herschel’s consent to become its nominal head. “The President,” he wrote to Captain Smyth, “must be a man of brass (practical astronomer)—a micrometer-monger, a telescope-twiddler, a star-stringer, a planet-poker, and a nebula-nabber. If we give bail that we won’t let him do anything if he would, we shall be able to have him, I hope. We must all give what is most wanted, and his name is even more wanted than his services. We can do without his services, not without loss, but without difficulty. I see we shall not, without great difficulty, dispense with his name.”
And to Herschel himself: “We have been making our arrangements for the Society for the ensuing year; and one thing is that you are not to be asked to do anything, or wished to do anything, or wanted to do anything. But we want your name.” It was lent; and its credit seems to have had the desired effect.