Sir John Herschel died at Collingwood on Thursday morning, at
the age of 79. The son of the discoverer of Uranus and its planets, and himself a practical astronomer of a very high order, Sir John Herschel will probably be remembered almost as much by the exquisite lucidity and vividness of his works of scientific exposition, as by his catalogues of the stars of both hemispheres. His "Preliminary Dissertation on the Study of Natural Philosophy," and his "Outlines of Astronomy" are books known wherever science is studied ; indeed, the former was, in fact, no mean trea- tise on the methods of the inductive philosophy. Nor was Sir
John Herschel much less remarkable as a metaphysician. One of his essays on Causation in the Quarterly Review, since, we believe, republished amongst other essays, contained perhaps the ablest criticism yet published on that depreciating theory of ' cause ' which defines it as merely "invariable and necessary antecedent." Scientific method was always discernible in his thought. He had inherited great faculties, and developed them to the utmost. Physically, too, few grander heads have been visible in our time. Among the wonderful series of amateur photographs exhibited a few years ago by Mrs. Cameron, there was none so striking as that of Sir John Herschel, which contained all that expression of imagi- native wonder and weird power appropriate to the head of some great medieval necromancer, in combination with the piercing and accurate eye of laborious and modest science.
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