ii6 Bath in its fetation to Science. 



taking as his pattern a small Gregorian which he hired from 

 a broker's shop. He set it up in the garden of his house in 

 New King-street, where in " sweeping the heavens " he dis- 

 covered the planet Uranus, aided, in the watches of the 

 night, by a devoted brother and sister. Caroline Herschel 

 was one of the most remarkable women ever known in Bath. 

 Poor, patient, persevering, entirely self-educated, but with 

 great intellectual power, she conquered extraordinary scien- 

 tific difficulties. Other women would have been content 

 with affectionate attendance on the two brothers, reading to 

 them while they were at work or lightening their labours in 

 grinding and polishing their lenses, but she took up the work 

 of study where they left it and carried on their profound 

 observations, discovering no less than eight comets. Her 

 literary work alone would have placed her in the front rank 

 of English women. When at length her elder brother was 

 tempted from Bath to the neighbourhood of Windsor by 

 George III. she removed with him, and enjoyed his fame. 

 Not in idleness, for in the intervals of her own observations 

 she wrote two works on the stars, published by the Royal 

 Society, and a third for which the Astronomical Society 

 awarded their gold medal. 



Bath has been called with truth the birth-place 

 of English geology. In other countries, 

 notably Germany and Switzerland, there had been earnest 

 students of the structure of the earth. Werner in one, and 

 Saussure in the other, had learned much relating to its crust, 

 but no one had anticipated the discoveries of William 

 Smith. They were made early in the present century, while 

 he was living in Bath engaged in the construction of the 

 Somerset Coal Canal. One who knew him well — Mr R. C. 

 Taylor, author of Statistics of Coal, says, in a MS. memoir 



