A Hanoverian by birth, and a member of the band of the Hanoverian Guards, Herschel, after tasting the discomforts of war in the shape of a night spent in a ditch on the field of Hastenbeck, where that egregious general the Duke of Cumberland was beaten by the French, concluded that he was not designed by Nature for martial distinction, and abruptly solved the problem of his immediate destiny by recourse to the simple and unheroic expedient of desertion. He came to England, got employment after a time as organist of the Octagon Chapel at Bath, and was rapidly rising into notice as a musician, when the force of his genius, combined with a discovery which came certainly unsought, but was grasped as only a great man can grasp the gifts of Fortune, again changed the direction of his life, and gave him to the science of astronomy. He had for several years employed his spare time in assiduous observation; and, finding that opticians' prices were higher than he could well afford, had begun to make Newtonian reflectors for himself, and had finally succeeded in constructing one of 6-1/2 inches aperture, and of high optical quality. With this instrument, on the night of March 13, 1781, he was engaged in the execution of a plan which he had formed of searching the heavens for double stars, with a view to measuring their distance from the earth by seeing whether the apparent distance of the members of the double from one another varied in any degree in the course of the earth's journey round the sun. He was working through the stars in the constellation Gemini, when his attention was fixed by one which presented a different appearance from the others which had passed his scrutiny. In a good telescope a fixed star shows only a very small disc, which indeed should be but a point of light; and the finer the instrument the smaller the disc. The disc of this object, however, was unmistakably larger than those of the fixed stars in its neighbourhood--unmistakably, that is, to an observer of such skill as Herschel, though those who have seen Uranus under ordinary powers will find their respect considerably increased for the skill which at once discriminated the tiny greenish disc from that of a fixed star. Subsequent observation revealed to Herschel that he was right in supposing that this body was not a star, for it proved to be in motion relatively to the stars among which it was seen. But, in spite of poetic authority, astronomical discoveries do not happen quite so dramatically as the sonnet 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer' suggests. 'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken'