and, by way of encouragement, a telescope adapted for ‘sweeping,’ consisting of a tube with two glasses, such as are commonly used in a ‘finder,’ was given me.  I was ‘to sweep for comets,’ and I see by my journal that I began August 22, 1782, to write down and describe all remarkable appearances I saw in my ‘sweeps,’ which were horizontal.  But it was not till the last two months of the same year that I felt the least encouragement to spend the star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar-frost, without a human being near enough to be within call.  I knew too little of the real heavens to be able to point out every object so as to find it again without losing too much time by consulting the atlas.”  And, in another place, she says:  “I had, however, the comfort to see that my brother was satisfied with my endeavors to assist him, when he wanted another person either to run to the clocks, write down a memorandum, fetch and carry instruments, or measure the ground with poles, etc., of which something of the kind every moment would occur.”  How successful she was in her sky-sweeping may be judged from the fact that she herself discovered no less than eight different comets at various times during her apprenticeship.  Her work was not unattended by danger and accidents, and on one occasion, on a cold and cloudy December night, when a strip of clear sky revealed some stars and there was great haste made to observe them, in assisting her brother with his huge telescope she ran in the dark on ground covered with melting snow a foot deep, tripped, and fell on a large iron hook such as butchers use, and which was attached for some purpose to the machine.  It entered her right leg, above the knee, and when her brother called, “Make haste,” she could only answer by a pitiful cry, “I am hooked.”  He and the workmen were instantly with her; but they did not free her from the torturing position without leaving nearly two ounces of her flesh behind, and it was long before she was able to take her place again at the instrument.

It would be interesting, if it were but practicable, to give a brief journal of her life during the fifty years she lived in England, from the time of her arrival in Bath, August 28, 1772, till the time of her brother’s death, August 25, 1822, after which she returned to Hanover.

We have given enough, perhaps, to suggest the mode and the activity of her life; but of her brother’s marriage, and the trial it brought upon her in giving up the supreme place she had held in his love and companionship for sixteen years; of the details of her discoveries, and the interesting correspondence which accompanied them; of her various great and noble friends, and her relations with them; of the death of her brother, then Sir William Herschel, and the terrible blow it proved to her; of her return to Holland, to the home of another brother; of her sorrow and disappointment at the changes which had taken place