superior to all the rest. Thereupon the king ordered that the instrument be brought to Windsor, and since it there met with marked approval, his majesty graciously awarded me a yearly pension, that I might be enabled to relinquish my profession of music, and devote my whole time to astronomy and the improvement of the telescope. Gratitude, as well as other considerations specified by me in a paper presented to the Royal Society, of which I am a member, has induced me to call the new planet Georgium Sidus.
"'Georgium Sidus.—jam nunc assuesce vocari.'—(Virgil.)
We know but little of the family of Herschel. The name is undoubtedly Jewish, and is found in Poland, Germany, and England. We learn that the ancestors of the present branch left Moravia about the beginning of the XVIIth century, on account of their change of religion to Protestantism. They became possessors of land in Saxony. Hans Herschel, the great-grandfather of William, was a brewer in Pirna (a small town near Dresden). Of the two sons of Hans, one, Abraham (born in 1651, died
