Page:Sir William Herschel, his life and works (1881).djvu/75

Rh in England but in the whole world, simply by the discovery of Uranus. Suppose, for example, that the last planet in our system had been Saturn. No doubt would have gone on. In spite of one and another difficulty, he would have made his ten-foot, his twenty-foot telescopes. His forty-foot would never have been built, and the two satellites which he found with it might not have been discovered. Certainly Mimas would not have been. His researches on the construction of the heavens would have been made; those were in his brain, and must have been ultimated. The mass of observations of Saturn, of Jupiter, of Mars, of Venus, would have been made and published. The researches on the sun, on the "invisible rays" of heat, on comets and nebulæ—all these might have been made, printed, and read.

But these would have gone into the Philosophical Transactions as the work of an amateur astronomer, "Mr., of Bath." They would have been praised, and they would have been doubted. It would have