Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/81

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

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:

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