< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu
This page has been validated.
63
CAROLINE LUCRETIA HERSCHEL.

of which ambitious women complain so much in these degenerate days. She continues the diary of her labors:

"4th.—I wrote to Hanover; booked my observations; made accounts. The night is cloudy.

"5th.—Calculated nebulas all day. The night was tolerably fine, and I saw the comet.
"6th.—I booked my observations of last night. Received a letter from Dr. Blagden in the morning, and in the evening Sir J. Banks, Lord Palmerston, and Dr. Blagden, came and saw the comet. The evening was very fine.
"7th and 8th.—Booked my observations. On the 8th the evening was cloudy.
"9th.—I calculated 100 nebulæ.
"10th.—Calculated 100 nebulæ. The smith borrowed a guinea.
"11th.—I completed, to-day, the catalogue of the first thousand.
"13th.—Prof. Kratzensteine, from Copenhagen, was here to-day. In the evening I saw the comet, and swept.
"14th.—I calculated 140 nebulæ to-day, which brought me up to the last-discovered nebulæ, and therefore the work is finished."

Miss Herschel says it is impossible for her to give an account of all that passed around her in the following two years, for they were spent in a perfect chaos of business.

But in 1788, after he was fifty years old, her brother married a wealthy widow, of about the same age as Miss Herschel. It is said by the editor that the wife was very amiable and gentle, and that the jointure she brought enabled her husband to pursue his scientific career without anxiety about expenses. But this was evidently not so. We must infer from the statements of Miss Herschel that this wealth, like royal patronage, was not applied to relieve Sir William from drudgery; for, to the end of her brother's life, she complains that, instead of pursuing original investigations, he had to spend an enormous amount of time and labor making and selling telescopes; and that the fatigue and exhaustion from polishing mirrors told seriously upon his health. In 1805, more than a dozen years after his marriage, we hear of his finishing an instrument for the King of Spain, and at about the same time another for the Prince of Canino. She further says that he was miserably stinted for room for his instruments, and continually bemoans the embarrassments and hinderances which defeated his plans of study, and asserts that, during the last years of his life, his spirits were depressed and his temper soured by these circumstances.

In her diary, all that Miss Herschel says of her brother's marriage is this:

"It may easily be supposed that I must have been fully employed (besides minding the heavens) to prepare everything as well as I could against the time I was to give up the place of housekeeper on the 8th of May."

When, in after-years, she was preparing the materials for her biog-

    This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.