John F. W. Herschel
The son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus. John Herschel studied mathematics and astronomy, made an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in order to supplement his father's astronomical work made in the northern hemisphere.
As a philosopher of sciece, his book A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) was influencial in illustrating rules of induction and hypothetico-deductive method with concrete examples from physics and related fields; for instance, young Darwin eagerly read it, and Mill's famous "Canons of Induction" are nothing but reformulations of some of Herschel's views.
Further, as some historians (C. C. Gillispie in particular) have pointed out, his long review of Quetelet raised interests in probability theory among British scholars; young Maxwell presumably got inspiration from this review, as one can infer from Maxwell's famous 1860 paper on the kinetic theoy of gases as well as from Maxwell's letter (1850) to Campbell. It may be noted that Herschel suggested the frequency interpetation of probability against the Laplacian "classical" (but ambivalent) view.
See Herschel-Mill on Induction
