Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/132

120 such as butchers use for hanging their joints upon, and having to run in the dark on ground covered a foot deep with melting snow, I fell on one of these hooks, which entered my right leg above the knee. My brother's call, 'Make haste!' I could only answer by a pitiful cry, 'I am hooked!' He and the workmen were instantly with me, but they could not lift me without leaving two ounces of my flesh behind. . . . At the end of six weeks I began to have some fears about my poor limb. . . . I had, however, the comfort to know that my brother was no loser through this accident, for the remainder of the night was cloudy." The compensation she urges, in extenuation of the accident, by its drollery almost makes us forget its gravity. Once also when her "brother was elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary cross-beam instead of a safe gallery," a very high wind so shook the apparatus that "he had hardly touched the ground before the whole of it came down." If accidents so serious happened before the heavier and more cumbrous machinery of the 40-feet telescope was erected, we may be certain that Herschel's mechanical skill did not avail to prevent them in the working of the great telescope.

If Herschel had done nothing more for science than build this great telescope he would have amply earned the high eulogium graven on his tombstone at Upton, "The barriers of the heavens he broke through, penetrating as well as exploring their more remote spaces." Nothing to compare with it had been seen before. It was a wonder that the gravest man of science regarded with deepest admiration, and children at school looked on with awe in the pictures of it seen on the pages of