Chapter XII.—The account of Herschel’s career is taken chiefly from Mrs. John Herschel’s Memoir of Caroline Herschel, from Miss A. M. Clerke’s The Herschels and Modern Astronomy, from the Popular History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century by the same author, and from Holden’s Sir William Herschel, his Life and Works. The last three books and the Synopsis and Subject Index to the Writings of Sir William Herschel by Holden & Hastings have been my chief guides to Herschel’s long series of papers; but nearly every thing that I have said about his chief pieces of work is based on his own writings. I have made also some little use of Grant’s History (already quoted), of Wolf, and of Miss Clerke’s System of the Stars.

Students are recommended to read any or all of the first four books named above; the Memoir gives a charming picture of Herschel’s personal life and especially of his relations with his sister. There is also a good critical account of Herschel’s work on sidereal astronomy in Proctor’s Old and New Astronomy.

Chapter XIII.—Except in the articles dealing with gravitational astronomy I have constantly used Miss Clerke’s History (already quoted), a book which students are strongly recommended to read; and in dealing with the first half of the century I have been helped a good deal by Grant’s History. But for the most part the materials for the chapter have been drawn from a great number of sources—consisting very largely of the original writings of the astronomers referred to—which it would be difficult and hardly worth while to enumerate; for the lives of astronomers (especially of English ones), as well as for recent astronomical history generally, I have been much helped by the obituary notices and the reports on the progress of astronomy which appear annually in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I add the names of a few books which deal with special parts of modern astronomy in a non-technical way:—

The Sun, C. A. Young; The Sun, R. A. Proctor; The Story of the Sun, R. S. Ball; The Sun’s Place in Nature, J. N. Lockyer.

The Moon, E. Neison; The Moon, T. G. Elger.

Saturn and its System, R. A. Proctor.

Mars, Percival Lowell.

The World of Comets, A. Guillemin (a well-illustrated but uncritical book, now rather out of date); Remarkable Comets, W. T. Lynn (a very small book full of useful information); The Great Meteoritic Shower of November, W. F. Denning.

The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System, G. H. Darwin.

Remarkable Eclipses, W. T. Lynn (of the same character as his book on Comets.)

The System of the Stars, A. M. Clerke.

Spectrum Analysis, H. Schellen; Spectrum Analysis, H. E. Roscoe.

INDEX OF NAMES.

Roman figures refer to the chapters, Arabic to the articles. The numbers given in brackets after the name of an astronomer are the dates of birth and death. All dates are A.D. unless otherwise stated. In cases in which an authors name occurs in several articles, the numbers of the articles in which the principal account of him or of his work is given are printed in clarendon type thus: 286. The names of living astronomers are italicised.