Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/182

170 and grief to the friends of Newton, Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibnitz, Bernoulli, Laplace, and which render their lives sometimes most unpleasant reading. A quarrel for the maintenance of truth and right is a necessity of life in a world, where falsehood and wrong seem often to have the best of it; but the meannesses and selfishness of scientific quarrels have little or nothing of this nobility about them. "The result of my observations would have been communicated long ago," Herschel wrote for the Royal Society, "if I had not still flattered myself with the hopes of some better success, concerning the diurnal motion of Venus; which, on acccount of the density of the atmosphere of this planet, has still eluded my constant attention as far as concerns its period and direction. Even at the present time I should hesitate to give the following extract from my journals, if it did not seem incumbent on me to examine by what accident I came to overlook mountains in this planet, which are said to be of such enormous height, as to exceed four, five, and even six times the perpendicular elevation of Cimboraça, the highest of our mountains. The same paper which contains the lines I have quoted, gives us likewise many extraordinary accounts, equally wonderful: such as hints of the various and singular properties of the atmosphere of Saturn." Then he proceeds to speak of Schroeter's measures as "defective"; the mirror of the 7-feet reflector used as "considerably tarnished"; and the "calculations (as) so full of inaccuracies, that it would be necessary to go over them again." The Lilienthal observer did not like this plain speaking.

To these somewhat sharp, but perhaps deserved criticisms, Schroeter replied in 1795. "Though it is a