July 26, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



108 



seemed to recover completely from this 

 great strain on his strength. 



But I have passed by an event of impor- 

 tance in the lives of both brother and sis- 

 ter, for in 1783 he married Mrs. Pitt, a 

 lady of singularly amiable and gentle char- 

 acter. To the sister, however, the mar- 

 riage was a great blow, for, although she 

 continued to be his secretary and assistant, 

 she moved into neighboring lodgings, and 

 was no longer so closely associated with 

 him as theretofore. Mrs. John Herschel 

 writes: "It is not to be supposed that a 

 nature so strong and a heart so affectionate 

 should accept the new state of things with- 

 out much and bitter suffering," and tradi- 

 tion confirms this belief. All her notes and 

 memoranda relating to a period of fifteen 

 years from the time of the marriage were 

 destroyed by her when, as we may pre- 

 sume, her calmer judgment showed her that 

 the record of her heart-burning would be 

 painful to the surviving members of the 

 family. At any rate, she was on affection- 

 ate terms with her sister-in-law throughout 

 all the later years of her life, and the bril- 

 liant career of her nephew, the celebrated 

 Sir John Herschel, and correspondence 

 with him, afforded the leading interest of 

 her old age. 



Although Herschel lived until 1822, and 

 accomplished an enormous amount of work 

 up to the end of his life, yet his health 

 seems to have declined from about the 

 time I have noted. On his death Caroline 

 felt that her life, too, was practically ended 

 and she returned to Hanover. Ever after- 

 wards she used to cry, "Why did I leave 

 happy England?" and it is incomprehen- 

 sible that she should not have returned to 

 the place where all her real interests lay. 



Although she felt the death of her 

 brother as practically the end of her life, 

 she was always full of jokes and fun. In 

 a letter to her nephew, she told him that 



her father used to punish her, a grown 

 woman, by depriving her of her pudding 

 if she did not guess rightly the angle of the 

 piece she had helped herself to. Dr. Gros- 

 kopf writes of her when she was eighty- 

 nine years of age : 



Well! what do you say of such a person being 

 able to put her foot behind her back and scratch 

 her ear with it, in imitation of a dog, when she 

 was in one of her merry moods? 



She only died in 1847, having very 

 nearly completed her ninety-eighth year. 



Herschel himself must have been a man 

 of singular charm, as is testified to by Dr. 

 Burney and his daughter Mme. d'Arblay. 

 That he possessed an incredible amount of 

 patience is proved by the fact of his sub- 

 mitting to the reading aloud of the whole 

 of a portentous, and fortunately unpub- 

 lished, poem in many cantos by Dr. Bur- 

 ney, entitled "A Poetical History of As- 

 tronomy." It appears that Herschel had 

 had an interview with Napoleon in Paris 

 in 1802, and the poet Campbell asked him 

 whether he had been struck by Napoleon's 

 knowledge. Said Herschel : 



No, the First Consul surprised me by his versa- 

 tility, but in science he seemed to know little more 

 than any well-educated gentleman, and of astron- 

 omy much less, for example, than our king. His 

 general air was something like affecting to know 

 more than he did know. 



He was struck, too, by Napoleon's hy- 

 pocrisy in observing "how all these glor- 

 ious views gave proofs of Almighty 

 Wisdom. ' ' 



And now having endeavored to show 

 what kind of people Caroline and her 

 brother were, I must turn to what they did. 

 Herschel 's discoveries were so numerous 

 that I am compelled to make a selection. 

 I shall therefore only attempt to sketch 

 his endeavor to understand the general con- 

 struction of the stellar universe, and to 

 speak of his work on double stars. 



