HERSCHEL, SIR JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM, BART. (1792-1871), English astronomer, the only son of Sir William Herschel, was born at Slough, Bucks, on the 7th of March 1792. His scholastic education commenced at Eton, but maternal fears or prejudices soon removed him to the house of a private tutor. Thence, at the early age of seventeen, he was sent to St John's College, Cambridge, and the form and method of the mathematical instruction he there received exercised a material influence on the whole complexion of his scientific career. In due time the young student won the highest academical distinction of his year, graduating as senior wrangler in 1813. It was during his undergraduateship that he and two of his fellow-students who subsequently attained to very high eminence, Dean Peacock and Charles Babbage, entered into a compact that they would "do their best to leave the world wiser than they found it,"--a compact loyally and successfully carried out by all three to the end. As a commencement of this laudable attempt we find Herschel associated with these two friends in the production of a work on the differential calculus, and on cognate branches of mathematical science, which changed the style and aspect of mathematical learning in England, and brought it up to the level of the Continental methods. Two or three memoirs communicated to the Royal Society on new applications of mathematical analysis at once placed him in the front rank of the cultivators of this branch of knowledge. Of these his father had the gratification of introducing the first, but the others were presented in his own right as a fellow.