Yet from boyhood I have been very much attached to astronomical pursuits. My father was well informed on the subject, and eventually, though several years later than myself, became a member of the Society.[364] He had long possessed a reflecting telescope, capable of showing Jupiter’s Moons and Belts, and Saturn’s Rings, though not, according to my recollection, any of the moons, even the rings appearing not severally but as one. He had also a Hadley’s Quadrant, an artificial horizon, and a tolerably good clock, and he regularly took in the “Nautical Almanac.”
By means of this simple apparatus, he not only regulated the clock, but determined the latitude and even the longitude of our house, or rather of the playground, at Hill Top.
In these occupations I was invariably his assistant; and it was in this manner and with the aid of his lectures that I gradually acquired, even while a boy, a taste for Astronomy, and, for my age, no inconsiderable knowledge of the subject.
My father (like myself in youth and early manhood) was a great walker, and we frequently journeyed together. When I was only nine years of age, I walked with him, for the most part after dark, from Birmingham to Stourbridge, a distance of twelve miles, with occasional lifts—no doubt according to usage—on his back. I recollect that it was a brilliant starlight night, and the names of the constellations and of the brighter single stars, their apparent motions and the distinction between the so-called fixed stars and planets, formed then, as on many other similar occasions, never-failing subjects of interesting conversation, and to me of instruction. On the way we passed by the side of a small pool, and, the air being still, the surface of the water gave a perfect reflection of the stars. I have a vivid recollection, after an interval of nearly seventy years, of the fear with which I looked into what appeared to me a vast abyss, and of my clinging to my father to protect me from falling into it.
The remarkable comet of 1811—remarkable from the length of time it continued in sight—interested me greatly. I was then fifteen years of age. I examined it frequently with our telescope, got much information from my father and from such books as were accessible to me; and before the comet had disappeared was, I believe, tolerably familiar with what was then known of cometary astronomy.
As already stated in the “Prefatory Memoir,” the teaching of a subject was with me concurrent, or nearly so, with the learning. I soon began to lecture on Astronomy, first to the boys of our school, and afterwards to a literary and scientific association of which I was a member.
With a view to these lectures, availing myself of the “Transactions of the Royal Society” (taken in by one of the Birmingham libraries to which we subscribed), I read, I believe without exception, all the contributions of Sir William Herschel, then incomparably the first of living English astronomers. My reverence for the man led me to contrive, on the occasion of my second visit to London (1815), to go round by Slough, in order that I might obtain a glimpse—as the coach passed—of his great telescope, which I knew could be seen over the tops of the neighbouring buildings.
In the “Prefatory Memoir” I have already spoken of my teaching navigation, of the planispheres which I constructed for my father’s lectures upon electricity, of my trigonometrical survey, of my visit to Captain Kater and the Greenwich Observatory, and of my Vernier pendulums—all more or less intimately connected with my pursuit of Astronomy. Nor must I omit mention of a popular explanation of the transit of Mercury in May, 1832, which I wrote for the “Penny Magazine.” (See Vol. I., p. 82.)
I may also mention, as a fact worth recording, that in 1817 (I believe) the celebrated mathematician, M. Biot, passed through Birmingham on his return from the Shetland Isles, where he had been engaged in measuring an arc of the meridian.[365] My father was invited to dine with him, I think at the house of Mr. Tertius Galton; and afterwards both he and I, among others, were invited to meet him at the rooms of the Philosophical Institution. Very few obeyed this second summons, perhaps because the day fixed upon was Sunday. He showed us in action a small instrument for the polarization of light—a subject of which my father and I, and I think the others, were up to that time profoundly ignorant. The only individual with whom M. Biot appeared to be previously acquainted was an emigré, Dr. De Lys, a leading physician of Birmingham, whose father, the Marquis De Lys, had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror. In the evening we met again at a coach office in the Market Place, to bid farewell to M. Biot on his departure for London, when he caused some tittering, and put poor Dr. De Lys to the blush by publicly kissing him, in French fashion, on both cheeks.