About the time of his appointment in Bath Herschel commenced the study of languages and mathematics, reading Maclaurin’s ‘Fluxions’ and Ferguson’s ‘Astronomy.’ The perusal of the latter volume revived his love for astronomy. After fourteen or sixteen hours’ teaching he would retire to his bedroom and read of the wonders of the heavens. His interest increased as he proceeded, until, in his own words, “I resolved to take nothing upon trust, but to see with my own eyes all that other men had seen before me.” Accordingly he hired a small reflector. Inquiring the price of a larger instrument, he found it to be quite beyond his means. Then in 1772, when his sister came to keep his house for him, he resolved to make his own telescope. First he tried the fitting of lenses into pasteboard tubes, but this being a total failure, he bought the apparatus of a Quaker optician who had constructed, or attempted to construct, reflecting telescopes. In June 1773, assisted by his sister and by his brother Alexander, then in Bath, he commenced work. His first speculum mirror was five inches in diameter; and, while it was in process of construction, he was obliged to hold his hands on it for sixteen hours at a stretch, while his sister supplied his food and read ‘The Arabian Nights,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ and other tales aloud to him to pass the time. At last, after two hundred failures, he finished a 5-inch reflector, and on March 4, 1774, he observed the Orion nebula. No sooner had Herschel commenced his celestial explorations than he resolved to survey the entire heavens, leaving no spot unvisited.