182 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



also gratifying to be assured that her engrossing work in 

 astronomy in no wise caused her to neglect her home duties 

 or to lose that sweetness of character and delicacy of re- 

 finement for which she was noted before she entered upon 

 the absorbing and taxing career of astronomical computer. 



The wife of Lalande 's nephew, Mme. Lefranc,ais de 

 Lalande, proved herself in many respects a worthy succes- 

 sor of Mme. Lepaute. "My niece," writes her uncle, 

 Jerome Lalande, "aids her'husband in his observations and 

 draws conclusions from them by calculation. She has re- 

 duced the observations of ten thousand stars, and prepared 

 a work of three hundred pages of horary tables an im- 

 mense work for her age and sex. They are incorporated 

 in my Abrege de Navigation. 



"She is one of the rare women who have written scien- 

 tific books. She has published tables for finding the time 

 at sea by the altitude of the sun and stars. These tables 

 were printed in 1791 by the order of the National As- 

 sembly. ... In 1799 she published a catalogue of ten 

 thousand stars, reduced and calculated." 



This distinguished observer and computer had a daugh- 

 ter in whom her grand-uncle was particularly interested. 

 * ' This daughter of astronomy, ' ' he tells us, ' ' was born the 

 twentieth of January, 1790, the day on which we at Paris 

 saw for the first time the comet which Miss Caroline Her- 

 schel had just discovered. The child was accordingly 

 named Caroline ; her godfather was Delambre. ' ' 



The discoverer of the comet referred to was, in many 

 ways, a most remarkable woman. She was the sister of 

 Sir William Herschel, the illustrious pioneer of modern 

 physical astronomy and the virtual founder of sidereal 

 science, as we know it to-day. She was also the aunt of 

 Sir John Herschel, who was the only rival of his uncle, Sir 

 William, as an explorer of the heavens. 



But she was far more than a mere relative of these 

 immortal leaders in astronomic science. She herself was 



