ignorant of, and seems to have taught some of his children, was a knowledge of the starry heavens. Caroline, who enjoyed little of her infirm father's instruction and guidance, was sometimes taught by him to recognise stars and constellations in the cloudless nights; but the teaching then given was not seed that fell on a good soil. With William it was different. He was of an age and a disposition to be fascinated by the subject, and the golden hopes which the science at that time held out to astronomers must have coloured the dreams of many a youthful star-gazer. The British Government offered a great reward for the best means of finding the longitude of a ship's place at sea. A clockmaker might solve the problem by ingenious contrivances, and win the reward; or an astronomer, by more refined and more subtle methods, might furnish the sailor with knowledge and safety, and carry off the prize. William Herschel was a boy of thirteen when a young mathematician, almost self-taught, was appointed to a chair in the Hanoverian University of Göttingen, not forty miles from the town of Hanover.[1] It was John Tobias Mayer, who taught there from 1751 till his death in 1762, and whose widow got three thousand pounds of the reward for the solution he left behind him of the problem of the longitude. It is probable enough that the name of this famous astronomer, with whose writings Herschel became familiar in
- ↑ The favour with which Göttingen was regarded by George II., who founded both University and Observatory, could not fail to exercise an influence on Herschel and his father. In 1756 the King presented the Observatory with a mural quadrant of six feet radius, made by Bird of London.
