Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/137



was born on the 7th of March, 1792, at the village of Slough, near Windsor, England. His father was Sir William Herschel, a native of Hanover, Germany, who migrated in his youth to England, became an organist and choir master at Bath, at the same time as an amateur astronomer constructed powerful reflecting telescopes by means of which he discovered a new planet Uranus, and was invited by George III to become astronomer to the court at Windsor. He finally established himself in the village of Slough, in a house where there was a suitable grassplot for the erection of his celebrated large reflecting telescope. The mother of John Herschel, née Mary Baldwin, was the only daughter of a London merchant, had been a widow, and had brought to his father a moderate fortune. His father's salary as court astronomer was only £200, but he made much money from the construction of telescopes. John was their only child, and was thus the heir to considerable wealth. He received his primary education at a private school at Hitcham, Buckinghamshire, and was then sent to the great public school Eton in the neighborhood of Windsor; he remained there for a few months only, but when his mother saw him maltreated by a strange boy he was taken home and placed under the care of Mr. Rogers, a Scottish mathematician. He must have studied the classics thoroughly for at an advanced age he translated the whole of the Iliad into English hexameters. His father realized the importance of training in mathematics. At that time mathematical science had declined in England, through adulation of Newton and antipathy towards Leibnitz, but still flour-