The vulgar, ever prone to make mountains out of molehills, magnified the power of Sir William Herschel’s telescope beyond all bounds. Stories were circulated about his having given a dinner in the interior of the tube to a select party of friends, but as the diameter of the telescope was only a little more than 4 feet, the entertainment, to say the least of it, would have proved somewhat inconvenient to the guests. Another story, which was credited by great numbers of people, was that he had discovered inhabitants in the moon, but that he hesitated to make the matter public for fear he should be prosecuted for spreading atheistical notions. In fact, the tales told of Sir William Herschel’s telescope were endless, and caused the astronomer great inconvenience by attracting crowds of idle people to the neighbourhood of Slough, where he vainly endeavoured to carry on his investigations in peace and quietness. It was in vain that these silly assertions were disproved again and again. Having once believed them, people were slow to reject them, and the story of the dinner was told over and over again for many years. [Illustration: FIG. 47.—The Herschellian Telescope. ] The instrument above described is one of those known as _front view telescopes_, on account of the image of the star being reflected from the surface of the mirror, which was placed obliquely at the bottom of the tube in front of the observer, who examined it by means of the eye-piece without any other reflection taking place, thereby effecting a saving of light, which fully compensated for any loss caused by the mirror being placed askew. The concave mirror made by Herschel alone weighed a ton, to say nothing of the enormous tube and its fittings. Herschel had consequently to invent a special apparatus for holding and moving this gigantic instrument. The moving gear consisted of a mass of beams, pulleys and cords, reminding one more of the rigging of a ship than of a philosophical instrument. The apparatus for moving the telescope appeared so complicated to the casual observer, although in reality it was very simple, that it doubtless contributed in no small degree to the propagation of the fanciful stories we have already spoken of. The performances of this splendid instrument hardly came up to the expectations of those who saw it in progress. Herschel, it is true, was enabled by its means to use a power of from 3 to 6,000, but he could only use these amplifications on a few objects—the planets, for instance, giving so little light under a high power as to become indistinct and misty. In 1802 Baron von Zach, in his _Monthly Astronomical Compendium_, went so far as to say that this colossal instrument was not of the slightest utility, that no discovery had ever been made with it, and that it ought to be considered merely as an optical curiosity. Subsequent events, however, proved very conclusively that Baron von Zach was utterly wrong in his statements and prophecies.