In an 1833 paper appended to his fifth catalog of double stars, the British astronomer John Herschel offered a rather extraordinary suggestion. Commenting on his cat-alog of over two thousand double stars (over half of which he had discovered), he singled out a bright star in the constellation Ursa Major with a dim companion that had not been previously noticed. In the case of this type of double star – a bright primary star with a very minute companion – he suggested that such dim companions were ‘in some instances possibly shining by reflected light.’1 He then went on to name five other double stars of this type and hinted that there could be more. In other words, one of the leading astronomers of the nineteenth century was suggesting that the dim companions observed in some double star systems were in fact planets. Modern astronomers refer to planets in orbit around stars other than our own as exoplanets. Contemporary accounts of the history of exoplanetary discovery say little regarding the search for these bodies or the possibility of observing such objects before the twentieth century.2 For many the idea of such objects extends back no further than the 1995 confirmation of a planet in orbit of the star 51 Pegasi. Herschel’s remark, however, implies that the ante-cedents of exoplanetary research in observational astron-omy can be pushed back to the early decades of the nineteenth century. But should this suggestion be taken as representative of a program of research? Was it the case that the heir of William Herschel, the discoverer of the first new planet orbiting our own sun, was actively searching for planets in orbit of other suns? Before venturing such a claim, one must note the con-text of Herschel’s suggestion and his apparent nonchalance in offering it. Just before this passage he had admitted ‘that the detection of double stars has been, and continues to be, a very secondary object in my observations.’ He claimed that he was not actively searching for double stars at all but that his catalog (the latest in his work on double stars stretching back over a decade) was merely a by-product of his sweeps for nebulae: ‘except some peculiar appearance in an unknown star has attracted attention while the star passed in review, the sweeping motion [of the telescope] has very seldom been arrested for the pur-pose of close inspection.’3 By his own account then, he was not scouring the heavens in search of such bodies. He was offering a possibility and calling attention to a specific class of double stars that merited more research. On the other hand, the possibility – indeed the assumed probability – of planets orbiting other stars was an accepted component of views of the universe during this period. John’s father William only voiced what many believed when he wrote in 1789 that every star ‘is probably of as much consequence to a system of planets. . . as our own sun. . .’ (though he had written six years earlier that such a planetary system could likely ‘never be perceived by us’).4 The younger Herschel also commented on the possibility of planets orbiting other stars on multiple occasions in his published works. In his Treatise on Astronomy, also pub-lished in 1833, he referred to the stars as ‘effulgent centers