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Hector Macpherson. Herschel
Herschel
Table of Contents
Early Years
Herschel as Amateur Astronomer
CHAPTER II
Herschel as Professional Astronomer
CHAPTER III
Solar and Planetary Studies
CHAPTER IV
The Construction of the Heavens
CHAPTER V
Stellar Researches
CHAPTER VI
Closing Years
CHAPTER. VII
Personality and Influence
CHAPTER VIII
Отрывок из книги
Hector Macpherson
Published by Good Press, 2021
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At the age of fourteen and a half, young William Herschel entered the band of the Hanoverian Guards, on 1st May, 1753. His school life was at an end, but his education was only beginning. For over two years he received private lessons from a teacher named Hofschläger, who afterwards filled an important post at Hamburg. These lessons included languages, logic, ethics, and metaphysics. In those early years Herschel's thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable. "Although," he wrote in after years, "I loved music to excess and made considerable progress in it, I yet determined with a sort of enthusiasm to devote every moment I could spare to the pursuit of knowledge, which I regarded as the sovereign good, and in which I resolved to place all my future views of happiness in life."
This intellectual keenness was undoubtedly stimulated by the home environment. The mother, it is true, was hostile to intellectual ambition; she was a typical German Hausfrau, with no sympathy for aspirations; but, as before mentioned, Isaac Herschel encouraged his sons to talk and think on scientific and philosophical subjects. Caroline Herschel, then a little girl about five years of age, has given a very interesting glimpse into this period. "My brothers," she says, "were often introduced as solo performers and assistants in the orchestra of the court, and I remember that I was frequently prevented from going to sleep by the lively criticism on music on coming home from a concert, or conversations on philosophical subjects which lasted frequently till morning. . . . Generally their conversation would branch out on philosophical subjects, when my brother William and my father often argued with such warmth that my mother's interference became necessary when the names Leibnitz, Newton, and Euler sounded rather too loud for the repose of her little ones, who ought to be in school by seven in the morning."
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