CHAPTER VII.

SIR JOHN HERSCHEL AT CAMBRIDGE AND SLOUGH.

“The little boy is entertaining, comical, and promising,” Dr. Burney wrote after his visit to Slough in 1797. John Frederick William Herschel was then five years old, having been born “within the shadow of the great telescope” March 7, 1792. He was an industrious little fellow, especially in doing mischief. “When one day I was sitting beside him,” his aunt relates, “listening to his prattle, my attention was drawn by his hammering to see what he might be about, and I found that it was the continuation of many days’ labour, and that the ground about the corner of the house was undermined, the corner-stone entirely away, and he was hard at work going on with the next. I gave the alarm, and old John Wiltshire, a favourite carpenter, came running, crying out, ‘God bless the boy, if he is not going to pull the house down!’” And she wrote to him at Feldhausen; “I see you now in idea, running about in petticoats among your father’s carpenters, working with little tools of your own, and John Wiltshire crying out, ‘Dang the boy, if he can’t drive in a nail as well as I can!’”

“John and I,” she told his wife, “were the most affectionate friends, and many a half or whole holiday spent with me was dedicated to making experiments in chemistry, in which generally all boxes, tops of tea-canisters, pepper-boxes, teacups, etc., served for the necessary vessels, and the sand-tub furnished the matter to be analysed. I only had to take care to exclude water, which would have produced havoc on my carpet.”

From a preparatory school kept by Dr. Gretton at Hitcham, he was sent, a delicate, blue-eyed lad, to Eton. His mother, however, happening to see him maltreated by a stronger boy, brought him home after a few months, and his education was continued by a Scotch mathematician named Rogers, a man of considerable ability. His pupil held him in high respect; yet, though he learned Euclid accurately from him, he told Dr. Pritchard afterwards that “he knew no more of its real bearing and intention than he knew of the man in the moon.” The results of the home tuition were, none the less, exceedingly brilliant.

Herschel entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, at the age of seventeen, and his aunt noted in her Diary that, from the time of his admittance to the University until he quitted it, he gained all the first prizes without exception. He graduated as Senior Wrangler and First Smith’s Prizeman in 1813, a year in which honours were not cheap. Peacock, subsequently Dean of Ely, took second place, Fearon Fallows, the first Royal Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, came third, and Babbage withdrew from the competition, judging himself unable to beat, and not caring to be beaten by Herschel. Rivalry did not disturb their friendship. Having entered, together with Peacock, into a juvenile compact to do what in them lay “to leave the world wiser than they found it,” they, in 1812, set about fulfilling it by the establishment of the “Analytical Society of Cambridge.” Its object was to substitute in England for Newton’s fluxional method the more flexible and powerful calculus in use on the Continent; or, as Babbage expressed it, punning on the required change of notation, “to uphold the principles of pure D-ism in opposition to the _Dot_-age of the University.” The trio of innovators were full of enthusiasm, and they carried through a reform vital to the progress of British science. Herschel laboured zealously in the cause. In combination with his two allies, he translated Lacroix’s elementary treatise on the Differential Calculus, which became a text-book at Cambridge; and published, in 1820, an admirable volume of “Examples.” “In a very few years,” to use Babbage’s words, “the change from dots to d’s was accomplished; and thus at last the English cultivators of mathematical science, untrammelled by a limited and imperfect system of signs, entered on equal terms into competition with their Continental rivals.” Herschel, writing in the _Quarterly Review_, playfully described the process by which this was brought about. “The brows of many a Cambridge moderator,” he said, “were elevated, half in ire, half in admiration, at the unusual answers which began to appear in examination-papers. Even moderators are not made of impenetrable stuff; their souls were touched, though fenced with seven-fold Jacquier, and tough bull-hide of Vince and Wood. They were carried away with the stream, in short, or replaced by successors full of their newly acquired powers. The modern analysis was adopted in its largest extent.”

John Herschel was one of Babbage’s “chief and choicest companions,” who breakfasted with him every Sunday after chapel, and discussed, during three or four delightful hours, “all knowable, and many unknowable things.” His life-long friendship with Whewell began after his election to a Fellowship of his College. It lent charm to the occasional residences at Cambridge, which terminated in 1816, on his attaining the dignity of Master of Arts. He celebrated his coming of age at home, and was with his father at Brighton when Campbell characterised him as “a prodigy in science, and fond of poetry, but very unassuming.” His first publication was a paper on “Cotes’s Theorem,” sent, in October, 1812, to the Royal Society, of which body he was chosen a member, May 27, 1813. This was followed by a series of memoirs on various points of analysis, their signal merit being recognised, in 1821, by the bestowal of the Copley Medal. His investigations in pure mathematics were carried no further; but he had done enough to show his power and originality, and materially to widen the scope of the new methods.

He was in no hurry to choose a profession. Evenly balanced inclinations demanded, circumstances indulged delay; so he paused. His father wished him to enter the Church; but he preferred the law, and was enrolled a student at Lincoln’s Inn, January 24, 1814. The step was a simple formality. It committed him to nothing. And, in fact, while nominally reading for the Bar, his thoughts were running in a totally different direction. Dr. Wollaston, whose acquaintance he made in London, fascinated him, and his influence served to steady the helm of his intentions. Having decided finally for a scientific career, he returned to Slough, and plunged into experiments in chemistry and physical optics.

On September 10th, 1816, he informed a correspondent that he was “going, under his father’s direction, to take up star-gazing.” This brief sentence gives the first tidings of an astronomical element in his life. Its growth was slow. He had no instinctive turn that way. It was through filial reverence that he resolved to tread in his father’s footsteps. His self-denial received a magnificent reward. He took a place expressly reserved for him, as it might seem, beside his father as an explorer of the skies on the grandest scale. But for this moral purpose, he might have squandered time in a multiplicity of partial researches. So late as 1830 he told Sir William Rowan Hamilton: “I find it impossible to dwell for very long on one subject, and this renders my pursuit of any branch of science necessarily very desultory.” His nebulæ and double stars saved him from being “everything by turns, and nothing long.” Their collection and revisal, begun as a duty, grew to be irresistibly attractive, and John Herschel pledged himself definitively to astronomy.

His earliest undertaking was the re-examination of his father’s double stars. Entered upon at Slough in 1816, it was continued from 1821 to 1823 at the observatory in Blackman Street, Southwark, of Mr., afterwards Sir James South, where, with two excellent refracting telescopes, of five and seven feet focal length, the colleagues measured 380 of Sir William Herschel’s original pairs. Double stars want a great deal of looking after. Their discovery should be the prelude to long processes of investigation. It is of little interest unless diligently followed up. Each represents a system, individual in its peculiarities, and probably of most complex organisation. The more such systems are studied, the more wonderful they appear. Two associated stars have often proved, on keener scrutiny, to be themselves very closely double; and in other cases, disturbed motion has revealed the existence of obscure masses--planets on a colossal scale, possibly the spacious abodes of unimaginable forms of life.

The “Astronomy of the Invisible,” however, was still in the future when Herschel and South did their work. Facts relating to binary revolutions were scantily forthcoming, and the science to be founded on them had been rather indicated than established. Fresh observations were then needed to ascertain how the circling stars had behaved since 1802. The results proved highly satisfactory. In Francis Baily’s words, “The remarkable phenomena first brought to light by Sir William Herschel were abundantly confirmed, and many new objects pointed out as worthy the attention of future observers.” To take a couple of examples. Eta Coronæ was found to have described, since 1781, one entire round, and to be just starting on a second. Again, Tau Ophiuchi had been perceived, by the elder Herschel, at his first sight of it in April, 1783, to be “elongated.” “One half of the small star,” he said, “if not three-quarters, seems to be behind the large star.” This effect was imperceptible to his son. It had become entirely effaced in the course of forty years. The star was, in 1823, perfectly round; it had, as it were, absorbed its companion. By slow degrees, however, the two came into separate view, and now form an easy telescopic object. Their period of revolution is not less than two centuries. Another point of special interest was the detection of marked eccentricity in a stellar orbit--that of Xi Ursæ Majoris. These stars perform their circuits in just sixty years; but in 1821 their apparent speed was so great that changes in their relative positions could be determined from month to month. For these observations, published with notes and discussions in the _Philosophical Transactions_ for 1824, Herschel and South received the Lalande Prize of the French Academy in 1825, and the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society in 1826. In the latter distinction, Wilhelm Struve and Amici of Modena were associated with them. These four were the only double star observers then living.

Their exertions served to define more closely the circumstances of stellar movement. The crucial question could now be put, whether they are governed by the force that binds the planets to the sun, or by some other form of attractive influence. In other words, is the law of gravitation universal? An answer could only be obtained experimentally, by computing, on gravitational principles, the paths of the best-known pairs, and then _trying the fit_. If the stars, as time went on, kept near their predicted places, the unity of nature in this respect might be safely inferred; although considerable discrepancies might in any case be expected, owing to errors of measurement minute in themselves, but large relatively to curves reduced by distance to hair-breadth dimensions.

This kind of inquiry was fairly started in 1827, when Savary computed the orbit of Xi Ursæ. His success made it almost certain that the pair moved under the planetary regimen, conformed to, there is no reason to doubt, by all binaries. John Herschel, although not the first, was the most effective early investigator of stellar orbits. His method, described before the Royal Astronomical Society January 13, 1832, and approved by the award of its Gold Medal in 1833, went to the root of the matter. The author declared it a mere waste of time to attempt to deal, by any refined or intricate process of calculation, with data so uncertain and irregular as those at hand. “Uncertain and irregular,” it must be repeated, because referred to a scale on which tenths of a second assume large proportions. He accordingly discarded, as mere pedantic trifling, such analytical formulæ as those employed by Savary and Encke, and had recourse to a graphical process, in which “the aid of the eye and hand” was used to “guide the judgment in a case where judgment only, and not calculation, could be of any avail.” The operation which he went on to explain was commended by Sir George Airy for its “elegance and practical utility.” Nothing more appropriate could have been devised than this plan, at once simple, ingenious, and accommodating, for drawing a curve representative of the successive relative positions of double stars. Its invention effectively promoted acquaintance with their orbits; most of those at present known having, indeed, been calculated with its aid.

In 1821, Herschel travelled, in Babbage’s company, through Switzerland and Italy. His only recorded adventure was an ascent of Monte Rosa. In the following year he visited Holland with James Grahame, the learned author of a “History of America”; and on the removal of South’s observatory to Passy, he again went abroad, starting with Babbage, but returning alone. This time he made a number of scientific acquaintances. His father’s name worked like a spell. “I find myself,” he said, “for his sake, received by all men of science with open arms.” His modesty forbade him to remember that his own merits were already conspicuous. In Paris, Arago and Fourier showed him all possible attentions; he was welcomed at Turin “like a brother” by Plana, “one of the most eminent mathematicians of the age;” at Modena, Amici was, if possible, still more cordial. “He is the only man,” Herschel told his aunt, “who has, since my father, bestowed great pains on the construction of specula.” “Among other of your inquiring friends,” he continued, “I should not omit the Abbé Piazzi, whom I found ill in bed at Palermo, and who is a fine, respectable old man, though, I am afraid, not much longer for this world. He remembered you personally, having himself visited Slough.”

On July 3 Herschel “made the ascent of Etna, without particular difficulty, though with excessive fatigue.” On the summit, reached before sunrise, by “a desperate scramble up a cone of lava and ashes, one thousand feet high,” he found himself “enveloped in suffocating sulphurous vapours”; and “was glad enough to get down,” after having made a reading of the barometer in concert with the simultaneous observations of the brothers Gemellaro at Catania and Nicolosi. The same night he arrived at Catania “almost dead” from the morning’s arduous climb, “and the dreadful descent of nearly thirty miles, where the mules could scarce keep their feet.”

In traversing Germany, he deviated to Erlangen, where Pfaff was engaged in translating Sir William Herschel’s writings; and visited Encke, Lindenau, and Harding, at Seeberg, Gotha, and Göttingen. With Göttingen he had a special tie through his creation, in 1816, an honorary member of the University; and at Göttingen, too, he hoped to meet Gauss--a man of strange, and--to the lay mind--unintelligible powers. “Gauss was a god,” one of his fellow-mathematicians said of him; but the “god” was on this occasion absent--feasting with the “blameless Ethiopians,” perhaps, like the Homeric deities when wanted. He was reported “inconsolable” for the lost opportunity, which seems never to have recurred.

From Munich Herschel wrote to his aunt, in view of his approaching visit to Hanover:--“I hope you haven’t forgotten your English, as I find myself not quite so fluent in this language (German) as I expected. In fact, since leaving Italy, I have so begarbled my German with Italian that it is unintelligible both to myself and to everyone that hears it: and what is very perverse, though when in Italy I could hardly talk Italian fit to be heard, I can now talk nothing else, and whenever I want a German word, pop comes the Italian one in its place. I made the waiter to-day stare (he being a Frenchman) by calling to him, ‘Wollen Sie avere la bontà den acet zu apportaren!’ But this, I hope, will soon wear off.”

His next foreign holiday was spent in France. He had designed a new instrument for measuring the intensity of the sun’s radiations, and was eager to experiment with it alternately at high and low levels, for the purpose of determining the proportion of solar heat absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere. This method was employed with fine effect by Professor Langley on Mount Whitney in 1881. Herschel carried his “actinometer” to the top of the Puy de Dôme in September 1826, and waited at Montpellier for “one day of intense sunshine,” in order to procure his second term of comparison. The Puy de Dôme, with its associated three hundred summits, strongly allured him. “I have been rambling over the volcanoes of Auvergne,” he wrote from Montpellier, September 17, “and propose, before I quit this, to visit an extinct crater which has given off two streams of lava at Agde, a town about thirty miles south of this place on the road to the Spanish frontier. Into Spain, however, I do not mean to go--having no wish to have my throat cut. I am told that a regular diligence runs between this and Madrid, and is as regularly stopped and robbed on the way.”

This exploratory turn alarmed Miss Herschel. “I fear,” she replied, “you must often be exposed to great dangers by creeping about in holes and corners among craters of volcanoes.” He was, nevertheless, only dissuaded by his mother’s anxious remonstrances from pursuing their study in Madeira and Teneriffe.

In the autumn of 1827, Babbage accompanied him to Ireland. The young Astronomer Royal, Sir W. R. Hamilton, was unluckily absent at the time of their visit; but he sent Herschel, by way of compensation, one of his brilliant optical essays, and a correspondence sprang up from which a lasting friendship developed.

Herschel’s scientific occupations at home were meanwhile various and pressing. He co-operated in the foundation of the Astronomical Society, and became in 1821 its first foreign secretary. In 1824 he undertook the more onerous duties of secretary to the Royal Society, and rented a house in Devonshire Street for the three years of his term of office. Astronomy, it might have been feared, should be at least temporarily shelved; yet he informed his aunt, April 18, 1825, “A week ago I had the twenty-foot directed on the nebulæ in Virgo, and determined the right ascensions and polar distances of thirty-six of them. These curious objects I shall now take into my especial charge--nobody else can see them.”

His telescope, in fact, then held the championship. It was constructed in 1820 by himself, under his father’s directions, on the “front view” plan, the speculum being eighteen inches in diameter, and of twenty feet focal length. With it he executed, in 1824, a fine drawing of the Orion Nebula, with which “inexplicable phenomenon” he was profoundly impressed. It suggested to him no idea of a starry composition, and he likened its aspect to that presented by the “breaking up of a mackerel sky, when the clouds of which it consists begin to assume a cirrous appearance.”

In July, 1828, he succeeded in discerning the two Uranian satellites, Oberon and Titania, _authentically_ discovered by his father. They had not been seen, except incidentally at Slough, for thirty years. His pursuit of them, continued at intervals until 1832, had the result of confirming, while slightly correcting, Sir William Herschel’s elements of their motions. On September 23, 1832, he perceived Biela’s comet as a round, hazy object without a tail. It closely simulated a pretty large nebula. A small knot of very faint stars lay directly in its path, and, having before long overtaken them, it “presented, when on the cluster, the appearance of a nebula partly resolved into stars, the stars of the cluster being visible through the comet.” They shone undimmed, he estimated, from behind a veil of cometary matter 50,000 miles thick. Yet, only a month later, the remote prospect of a collision with this tenuous body threw Europe into a panic.

After Sir William Herschel’s death, his son formed the project of collecting into a memorial volume all his published papers; but he decided before long that he could add more to his fame by pursuing and verifying his observations than by reprinting them. The keynote of his life’s activity was struck in these words. His review of the 2,500 Herschelian nebulæ, more than half of which were invisible with any instrument except his own, was begun in the summer of 1825, and terminated in 1833. The assiduity with which it was prosecuted appeared by its completion in little more than half the time judged necessary for the purpose by the original discoverer. Yet he was not exempt from discouragement. “Two stars last night,” he wrote, July 23, 1830, “and sat up till two waiting for them. Ditto the night before. Sick of star-gazing--mean to break the telescopes and melt the mirrors.” Very few glimpses of this seamy side to the occupation are afforded us by either of the Slough observers. Modern astronomers, by comparison, would seem, like the Scotchman’s barometer, to have “lost all control over the weather.”

The efficacious promptitude with which John Herschel swept the skies appears truly wonderful when we remember that he was without a skilled assistant. No ready pen was at hand to record what he saw, and how he saw it; he was, by necessity, his own amanuensis; and writing by lamplight unfits the eye for receiving delicate impressions. Yet a multitude of the objects for which quest was being made were of the last degree of faintness. The results were none the less admirable. Embodied in a catalogue of 2,307 nebulæ, of which 525 were new, they were presented to the Royal Society July 1, 1833, and printed in the _Philosophical Transactions_ (vol. cxxiii.). Annotations of great interest, and over one hundred beautiful drawings, enhanced the value of the memoir.

Herschel was struck, in the course of his review, by the nebulous relations of double stars. A close, faint pair at the exact centre of a small round nebula in Leo; stellar foci in nebular ellipses; and a strange little group consisting of a trio of equidistant stars relieved against a nebulous shield, were specimen-instances illustrating “a point of curious and high physical interest.”

He also drew attention to “the frequent and close proximity to planetary nebulæ of minute stars which suggest the idea of accompanying satellites. Such they may possibly be.” If so, their revolutions might eventually be ascertained; and he urged the desirability of exact and persistent determinations of the positions of these satellite-stars. “I regret,” he concluded, “not having sufficiently attended to this in my observations, the few measures given being hurried, imperfect, and discordant.” Up to the present, these supposed systems have remained sensibly fixed; but they have been a good deal neglected. Mr. Burnham’s observations, however, with the Lick refractor in 1890–1, may supply a basis for the future detection of their movements in periods probably to be reckoned by millenniums.

The orbital circulation of compound nebulæ must be at least equally slow. They are most diverse in form and arrangement. “All the varieties of double stars as to distance, position, and relative brightness,” Herschel wrote, “have their counterparts in nebulæ; besides which, the varieties of form and gradation of light in the latter afford room for combinations peculiar to this class of objects.” Such, for instance, as the disparate union of an immensely long nebulous ray in Canes Venatici with a dim round companion, a small intermediate star occupying possibly the centre of gravity of the system.

Herschel’s drawings of double nebulæ have gained significance through their discussion, in 1892, by Dr. T. J. J. See of Chicago. They are now perceived to form a series aptly illustrative of the process, theoretically investigated by Poincaré and Darwin, by which a cooling and contracting body, under the stress of its consequently accelerated rotation, divides into two. If it be homogeneous in composition, its “fission” gives rise to two equal masses, presumed to condense eventually into a pair of equal stars. Disparity, on the other hand, between the products of fission indicates original heterogeneity; so that a large nebula must be of denser consistence than a smaller one physically connected with it. The chemical dissimilarity of the stars developed from them might explain the colour-contrasts often presented by unequal stellar couples. This view as to the origin of double nebulæ, and through them of double stars, although doubtless representing only a fragment of the truth, gives wonderful coherence to Herschel’s faithful delineations of what his telescope showed him.

No one before him had completely seen the “Dumb-bell” nebula in Vulpecula. Sir William Herschel had perceived the “double-headed shot” part of this “most amazing object,” but had missed the hazy sheath which his successor noticed as filling in the elliptic outline. He perceived similarly (unaware of Schröter’s observation) that the interior of the Ring-nebula in Lyra is not entirely dark; and compared the effect to that of fine gauze stretched over a hoop. An exceedingly long, nebular ellipse in Andromeda, with a narrow interior vacuity, left him “hardly a doubt of its being a thin, flat ring of enormous dimensions, seen very obliquely.” A photograph taken by Dr. Roberts, in 1891, corresponds strikingly with Herschel’s drawing. Some specimens of “rifted nebulæ,” were also included in the collection of 1833. They are double or even triple parallel rays, fragments, apparently, of single primitive formations. Herschel might well assert that “some of the most remarkable peculiarities of nebulæ had escaped every former observer.”

Both by the Royal, and by the Royal Astronomical Societies, medals were, in 1836, adjudged to this fine work. Its progress was accompanied by the discovery of 3,347 double stars, as well as by the re-measurement of a large number of pairs already known. The whole were drawn up into eight catalogues, presented at intervals to the Astronomical Society, and printed in their Memoirs. A good many of them would, nevertheless, be rejected by modern astronomers as “not worth powder and shot,” the stars composing them being too far apart to give more than an infinitesimal chance of mutual connection. From May 1828 onwards, these measures were made with “South’s _ci-devant_ great equatorial,” purchased by Herschel. The object-glass, by Tulley, was five inches in diameter. With a twelve-inch refractor, its successor in South’s observatory on Campden Hill, Herschel detected, on its trial-night, February 13, 1830, the sixth star in the “trapezium” of Orion. This minute object was then about one-third as bright as the fifth star in the same group, discovered by Robert Hooke in 1664, but forgotten, and re-discovered by Struve in 1826. A slow gain of light in Herschel’s star is not improbable.

He refused, in 1826, to compete for the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge. It was practically at his disposal, since all agreed that no one could better than Herschel have filled the chair once occupied by Newton. He was, however, disinclined for an University career, and had undertaken labours incompatible with it. In 1830 he stood as the “scientific candidate” for the presidentship of the Royal Society, against the Duke of Sussex. His defeat was by “a ridiculously small majority.” “I had no personal interest in the contest,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton. “Had my private wishes and sense of individual advantage weighed with me in opposition to what, under the circumstances, was an imperative duty, I should have persisted in my refusal to be brought forward; but there are situations where one _has_ no choice, and such was mine.”

He made Hamilton’s personal acquaintance at a dinner of notabilities, given by the Duke of Sussex, in March, 1832. An invitation to Slough followed, and Hamilton, arriving “in a beautiful star-time,” enjoyed celestial sights that seemed the opening of a new firmament.

Herschel married, March 3, 1829, Margaret Brodie, second daughter of the Rev. Alexander Stewart, of Dingwall, in Ross-shire. The event--not merely by convention a “happy” one--gave great satisfaction to his numerous friends. Miss Herschel was beside herself with glad emotion. “I have spent four days,” she informed him on his wedding-day, “in vain endeavours to gain composure enough to give you an idea of the joyful sensation caused by the news. But I can at this moment find no words which would better express my happiness than those of Simeon: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” But there was no finality in her desires for this brilliant scion of her race. His domestic felicity did not long content her; she craved worldly distinctions. When, after the accession of William IV., a shower of honours was let fall, she began to think plain “John Herschel, Esq.,” an address very inadequate to his merits. “Dr. Grosskopf,” the husband of one of her nieces, “has been _zum Ritter ernannt_ by his present Majesty,” she wrote discontentedly. “So was Dr. Mükry last week. If all is betitled in England and Germany, why is not my nephew, J. H., a lord or a wycount (_sic_) at least? General Komarzewsky used to say to your father, ‘Why does not King George III. make you Duke of Slough?’”

An instalment of her wishes was granted by his creation, in 1831, a Knight of the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order; and she lived to see him a baronet. She had no inkling of his approaching journey to the Cape when he came to see her in June, 1832, although the visit was designed as a farewell. Hanover itself, too, had for him an ancestral charm.

“It was only this evening,” he wrote home, “that, escaping from a party at Mrs. Beckedorff’s, I was able to indulge in what my soul has been yearning for ever since I came here--a solitary ramble out of town, among the meadows which border the Leine-strom, from which the old, tall, sombre-looking Marktthurm, and the three beautiful lanthorn steeples of Hanover are seen as in the little picture I have often looked at with a sort of mysterious wonder when a boy, as that strange place in foreign parts that my father and uncle used to talk so much about, and so familiarly. The _likeness_ is correct, and I soon found the point of view.”

Almost from the beginning of his surveying operations, Herschel cherished the hope of extending them to the southern hemisphere. But during his mother’s lifetime, he took no steps towards its realisation. The separation would have been cruel. Her death, however, on January 6th, 1832, at the age of eighty-one, removed this obstacle, and the scheme rapidly took shape. The station originally thought of was Parramatta, in New South Wales; but Dunlop’s observations there anticipated him, and he reflected with disappointment that “the cream of the southern hemisphere had been skimmed” before his turn came. He learned afterwards that nothing important in the “sweeping” line had been done at Parramatta; he had virgin skies to explore. A trip to the Himalayas was his next ambition; and one of the recommendations of the Cape of Good Hope was its being “within striking distance of India.” But to India he never went. The Cape was beyond question the most suitable locality for his purpose, and it would have been waste of time to have left it, even temporarily, for any other. He was offered a free passage thither in a ship of war, but preferred to keep his enterprise altogether on a private footing. So having embarked with his wife, three children, and instrumental outfit, on board the _Mountstuart Elphinstone_, he left the shores of England, November 13, 1833.