Page:Williamherschel00simegoog.djvu/203

Rh discoveries made by Herschel in the system of Uranus.

The two small planets, Ceres and Pallas, discovered in 1801 and 1807, have strangely given the tooth of envy an opportunity of wounding the good name of Herschel. As he found their discs like those of fixed stars, spurious and not measurable; as they "resembled small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them even by very good telescopes," as he imagined them from the haziness he saw around them to be "comets in disguise," he considered planet a misnomer as applied to them, and proposed to call them asteroids. Strange to say, the friend of Piazzi and Olbers, who discovered these small bodies, was charged with intending, by the suggestion of this diminutive, to cast a slight on the achievement of his friends, in comparison with his own glory as the discoverer of the great planet, Uranus. A more stupid slander of a most generous heart could scarcely be imagined. He predicted that the association of astronomers which had been formed on the Continent to hunt for more of them would be successful: "Many may soon be discovered," he informed the Royal Society. Two were caught within the next five years, Juno and Vesta, but the "many" foretold by Herschel in 1802 remained an unfulfilled prediction for more than forty years. He himself joined in the hunt, and failed: "I have already made five reviews of the Zodiac without detecting any of these concealed objects." Yet he was slandered as envious of the fame of others who had done what he confessed he had failed in doing, although in 1813 he told Thomas Campbell, the poet, that "there