If you have read Mr. Locke's amusing Moon
Hoax as often as I have, you have those details fresh in
your memory. As John Farrar taught us when all this
began,--and as I have said already,--if there were a
State House in Thornbush two hundred feet long, the first
Herschel would have seen it. His magnifying power was
6450; that would have brought this deaf and dumb State
House within some forty miles. Go up on Mt. Washington
and see white sails eighty miles away, beyond Portland,
with your naked eye, and you will find how well he would
have seen that State House with his reflector. Lord
Rosse's statement is, that with his reflector he can see
objects on old Thornbush two hundred and fifty-two feet
long. If he can do that he can see on our B. M. objects
which are five feet long; and, of course, we were beside
ourselves to get control of some instrument which had
some approach to such power. Haliburton was for at once
building a reflector at No. 9; and perhaps he will do it
yet, for Haliburton has been successful in his paper-
making and lumbering. But I went to work more promptly.
I remembered, not an apothecary, but an observatory,
which had been dormant, as we say of volcanoes, now for
ten or a dozen years,--no matter why! The trustees
had quarrelled with the director, or the funds had given
out, or the director had been shot at the head of his
division,--one of those accidents had happened which will
happen even in observatories which have fifteen-inch
equatorials; and so the equatorial here had been left as
useless as a cannon whose metal has been strained or its
reputation stained in an experiment.
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