n6 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



This is one and a pleasingly picturesque side of the 

 medal, that might have been struck to commemorate 

 the building of the great reflector. But another and 

 an almost incredible other side is presented on the 

 same page of her Memoirs. " I cannot leave this 

 subject," she says, "without regretting, even twenty 

 years after, that so much labour and expense should 

 have been thrown away on a swarm of pilfering work- 

 people, both men and women, with which Slough, I 

 believe, was particularly infested. For at last every- 

 thing that could be carried away was gone, and nothing 

 but rubbish left. Even tables for the use of work- 

 rooms vanished : one in particular I remember, the 

 drawer of which was filled with slips of experiments 

 made on the rays of light and heat, was lost out 

 of the room in which the women had been ironing. 

 ... It required my utmost exertion to rescue the 

 manuscripts in hand from destruction by falling into 

 unhallowed hands or being devoured by mice." A 

 nest of savage South Sea islanders, lifting whatever 

 they could carry away from a house within two or 

 three miles of Windsor Castle in the end of last cen- 

 tury may be an accurate picture of the ways and 

 manners of English workpeople then, but it is 

 pardonable to receive it with a smile of incredulity, 

 and to imagine other reasons for the alleged pil- 

 fering. 



Servants seem to have been a cross which Caroline 

 Herschel never could bear with an equal mind. In 

 1831, when she was eighty-one, she was as hard to 

 satisfy as in 1772, when she was only twenty-two: 

 " The first thing my radical servant did when she came 

 to me was to break the bottle containing the ink of my 



