To shed a ray of light on this question of sunshine Herschel sought, but sought in vain, for temperatures in ages that were past. He could get none. He was not aware of the thermometers made by the school of Galileo and lost to sight till Libri discovered them, and made them the common property of science.* But, resolved not to be baffled, Herschel turned to the rise and fall of the price of wheat at Windsor as an indication of the warmth or coldness of the sun’s rays. It was his only resource, and it was an idea worthy of a baffled man of science. But critics in the highest quarters attacked and ridiculed this seeker after truth as if he were guilty of supreme folly. Leaders of thought in every branch of science and in every department of life have to bear the brunt of ridicule from learned ignorance!
* Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja (1803-1869), an Italian-born mathematician and historian of science. Making private possessions ‘the common property of science’ is not something for which Libri is especially remembered today, quite the reverse in fact. In 1841, he was appointed Chief Inspector of French Libraries, but after the revolution of 1848 fled to England with a collection of some 30,000 books and manuscripts that had once been the common property of France’s academic institutions, but were now packed away in eighteen trunks with his name on them. The French government prosecuted him in absentia and sentenced him to ten years in gaol for theft, but he was safe in England and lived in reasonable comfort by selling off his ill-gotten gains.