ABSTRACT
Herschel, J.F.W. An immense impulse was now given to science and it seemed as if the genius of mankind, long pent up, had at length rushed eagerly upon Nature, and commenced, with one accord, the great work of turning up her hitherto unbroken soil, and exposing her treasures so long concealed. A general sense now prevailed of the poverty and insufficiency of existing knowledge in matters of fact; and, as information flowed fast in, an era of excitement and wonder commenced to which the annals of mankind had furnished nothing similar. It seemed, too, as if Nature herself seconded the impulse; and while she supplied new and extraordinary aids to those senses which were henceforth to be exercised in her investigation-while the telescope and the microscope laid open the infinite in both directionsas if to call attention to her wonders, she signalised the epoch, she displayed the rarest, the most splendid any mysterious, of all astronomical phenomena, the appearance and subsequent total extinction of a new and brilliant fixed star twice within the life of Galileo himself.
