g with enthusiasm from
his chair, exclaiming in rapture to Herschel:

"Thou art the man!"

The suggestion, thus happily approved, was immediately acted upon, and a
subscription, headed by that liberal patron of science, the Duke of
Sussex, with L10,000, was backed by the reigning King of England with
his royal word for any sum that might be needed to make up L70,000, the
amount required. No time was lost; and, after one or two failures, in
January 1833, the house of Hartley & Grant, at Dumbarton, succeeded in
casting the huge object-glass of the new apparatus, measuring
twenty-four feet (or six times that of the elder Herschel's glass) in
diameter; weighing 14,826 pounds, or nearly seven tons, after being
polished, and possessing a magnifying power of 42,000 times!--a
perfectly pure, spotless, achromatic lens, without a material bubble or
flaw!

Of course, after so elaborate a description of so astounding a result as
this, the "Edinburg Scientific Journal" (_i. e._, the writer in the "New
York Sun") could not avoid being equally precise in reference to
subsequent details, and he proceeded to explain that Sir John Herschel
and his amazing apparatus having been selected by the Board of Longitude
to observe the transit of Mercury, the Cape of Good Hope was chosen
because, upon the former expedition to Peru, acting in conjunction with
one to Lapland, which was sent out for the same purpose in the
eighteenth century, it had been noticed that the attraction of the
mountainous regions deflected the plumb-line of the large instruments
seven or eight seconds from the perpendicular, and, consequently,
greatly impaired the enterprise. At the Cape, on the contrary, there was
a magnificent table-land of vast expanse, where this difficulty could
not occur. Accordingly, on the 4th of September, 1834, with a design to
become perfectly familiar with the working of his new gigantic
apparatus, and with the Southern Constellations, before the period of
his observations of Mercury, Sir John Herschel sailed from London,
accompanied by Doctor Grant (the supposed informant,) Lieutenant
Drummond, of the Royal Engineers, F.R.A.S., and a large party of the
best English workmen. On their arrival at the Cape, the apparatus was
conveyed, in four days' time, to the great elevated plain, thirty-five
miles to the N.E. of Cape Town, on trains drawn by two relief-teams of
oxen, eighteen to a team, the ascent aided by gangs of Dutch boors. For
the det