CHAPTER VII - PLANETS AND SATELLITES

Summary

Johann Hieronymus SchrÖter was the Herschel of Germany. He did not, it is true, possess the more brilliant gifts of his rival. Herschel's piercing discernment, comprehensive intelligence, and inventive splendour were wanting to him. He was, nevertheless, the founder of descriptive astronomy in Germany, as Herschel was in England.

Born at Erfurt in 1745, he prosecuted legal studies at Göttingen, and there imbibed from Kästner a life-long devotion to science. From the law, however, he got the means of living, and, what was to the full as precious to him, the means of observing. Entering the sphere of Hanoverian officialism in 1788, he settled a few years later at Lilienthal near Bremen, as “Oberamtmann,” or chief magistrate. Here he built a small observatory, enriched in 1785 with a seven-foot reflector by Herschel, then one of the most powerful instruments to be found anywhere out of England. It was soon surpassed, through his exertions, by the first-fruits of native industry in that branch. Schrader of Kiel transferred his workshops to Lilienthal in 1792, and constructed there, under the superintendence and at the cost of the astronomical Oberamtmann, a thirteen-foot reflector, declared by Lalande to be the finest telescope in existence, and one twenty-seven feet in focal length, probably as inferior to its predecessor in real efficiency as it was superior in size.