year since the time we had left Bath. Nothing but bankruptcy
had all the while been running through my silly head, when
looking at the sums of my weekly accounts, and knowing they
could be but trifling in comparison with what had been and had
yet to be paid in town. I will only add, that from this time
the utmost activity prevailed to forward the completion of the
forty-foot."

In recognition of his scientific triumphs, the honorary degree of LL.D
was conferred upon Herschel, in 1786, by the University of Oxford. They
were triumphs that well merited such a recognition. He had already made
some important observations on the nature of double stars, on the
dimensions of the telescopic planets, and had begun his famous
investigations into the composition of the nebulae,--those clusters of
stars and nebulous matter which had previously proved such a problem to
astronomers. The remarkable phenomenon of a periodical change of
intensity in certain stars, which wax and wane in radiance like a
revolving light, had also excited his attention. Further, he had entered
upon the experiments which ultimately showed that the Sun positively
moves; that in this, as in other respects, the magnificent orb of day
must be ranged among the stars; that the apparently inextricable
irregularities of numerous sidereal proper motions arise in great part
from the displacement of the Solar System; that, in short, the point of
space toward which Earth and its sister planets are annually advancing,
is situated in the constellation of Hercules.

"Let us," says a French writer, "to these immortal labours add the
ingenious ideas that we owe to Herschel on the nebulae, on the
constitution of the Milky Way, on the Universe as a whole,--ideas which
almost by themselves constitute the actual history of the formation of
the worlds,--and we cannot but have a deep reverence for that powerful
genius that scarcely ever erred, notwithstanding the ardour of its
imagination."

The ordinary spectator, looking upon the face of the heavens through a
telescope, had, prior to Herschel's time, felt his curiosity excited by
the appearance here and there of filmy patches, vague in structure and
irregular in shape, which, from their resemblance to clouds, received
the name of _nebulae_. What these were, no astronomer had succeeded in
defining. It was left for Herschel, with his rare powers of patient and
discriminating observation, assi