which was at once both right and absurdly wrong, was coursing along the table. The lava had cooled, its heat was forgotten, when Colonel Welbred quietly interjected, "Sir Isaac Newton had been as much scoffed and laughed at formerly as Herschel was now; but, in return, Herschel, hereafter, would be as highly reverenced as Sir Isaac was at present." To it they again set. Someone remarked that "upon the heat in the air being mentioned to Dr. Heberden, he had answered that he supposed it proceeded from the last eruption in the volcano in the moon." "Ay," cried Colonel Manners, "I suppose he knows as much of the matter as the rest of them; if you put a candle at the end of a telescope, and let him look at it, he'll say, What an eruption there is in the moon!"
"But Mr. Bryant himself has seen this volcano from the telescope."
"Why, I don't mind Mr. Bryant any more than Dr. Heberden; he's just as credulous as t'other."
And thus the equerries wrangled at Windsor, while the rest of the world wondered or laughed at these volcanoes in the moon.[1]
Herschel's belief in an atmosphere of the moon was a heritage, a traditional heritage from the past. Had he fully examined the grounds on which the tradition was based, he would have opened a field of inquiry that remained closed for nearly a century and a half. In the total eclipse of the sun which happened in Switzerland on the 12th of May 1706, the red flames and the corona, features of an eclipse now known to everybody, were observed, apparently for the first time. Captain Stannyan, who was at Berne with the
- ↑ Miss Barney, Letters, iii, 375-380.
