forgotten. In the last year of her life, when visited by the Crown Prince of Hanover, his wife and child, she sang to them a composition of her brother William's, "Suppose we sing a Catch." The gulf between 1780 and 1847 was at once beautifully bridged by the little old lady of ninety-seven!
Dollond had shown in the Philosophical Transactions for 1758 how the colours, that rendered a refracting telescope useless as a means of discovery, might be obviated. He pointed out to his countrymen how flint glass and crown glass corrected each other's defect, and might be used, as they had never been used before, to search into the depths of heaven. It was a marvellous discovery; but thought in those days was perhaps slower of action than it is now, for a seed of truth, laden with immense possibilities, lay dying in the ground for sixty years, till Fraunhofer of Munich applied it to construct the great refractor of Dorpat. But it was reflecting telescopes of the Newtonian and Gregorian pattern, not refractors such as Dollond's, to which the enthusiast of Bath finally turned his attention. What Gregory and Newton had proposed or executed on a small scale, Herschel proceeded to build with his own hands on a vastly larger, after finding that the cost of even a small telescope would be above the price he "considered it proper to give." It was not a case, as might be supposed, of the narrow insularity of our countrymen thus to neglect a great discovery by following out a more cumbersome English method. Gregory, Newton, Dollond all belonged to this country. It was also the adopted home of Herschel, but he preferredthe toilsome telescopes of the two former to the simpler and now possible instrument of the latter.
