Leverrier, who died Director of the Paris Observatory, and who occupied himself more than any other astronomer with calculations of the motions of the planets, was intended to be an engineer. He was employed in the excise, when he suddenly discovered that the science of the skies was his vocation. It is well known that astronomy owes to him the discovery of the planet Neptune, which was the result of a mathematical calculation.
Olbers, who contributed so much to the theory for determining the orbits of comets, was a practicing physician in Bremen. He was accustomed to spend his evenings at home, after the day's round of calls, in reading for pleasure works on astronomy, to which science he rendered considerable services, while as a doctor he was in no way distinguished from the host of his competitors.
Th. von Oppolzer, to whom science is indebted for some splendid labors, intended first to embrace the career of his father, who was a distinguished physician; but he had hardly got his first case, when he was seized by the demon of astronomy; and he forever abandoned his early profession to devote himself to that science.
The great Herschel was a hautboy-player in a Hanoverian regiment, and the thought of being an astronomer never occurred to him till he was forty years old. At that time he wanted to get a telescope, and, as he had no means with which to buy one, he made one himself, and with it discovered Uranus. He was then made a doctor at Oxford, and entered the service of the English Government, with whose aid he was able to build his monster telescope. He afterward explored the sky to very remote depths, discovering nebulæ, and studying double stars and clusters of stars.
The astronomers whose stories have just been told are not exceptions. It must rather be admitted, as a general rule, that all the men who have made epochs in astronomy were deserters, or persons who had left some other profession to engage in astronomy. The academicians may confront me, on this point, with the life of the great Gauss. This celebrated astronomer, one of the greatest of all time, did indeed follow the direct road, but that was only because of his having, when he was young, attracted the attention of the Duke Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick. It is very probable that, but for this circumstance, he would have become something very different, perhaps a mason, or a fountain-builder, or an employé of the burial-office—three trades which his father carried on together. But it is quite as certain that Gauss would sooner or later have become an astronomer as that Raphael, as Lessing says, would have become a painter, even if he had lost his hands.
Frederick William Bessel, one of the most eminent astronomers of the nineteenth century, had been destined by his father to become a merchant, and the young man, who had a strong distaste for Latin and considerable fondness for mathematics, engaged in his studies
