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248 nature. Herschel had done so in a pre-eminent degree. With good reason, then, the world said. Tell us about him; his faults, if he had any, we can forgive and forget; his virtues we can admire or follow. Caroline Herschel did not take this view of her duty. She left it to others to write what she could have written better, and to record what she knew at first hand, and they did not know at all or only as dull echoes of a resounding past. "The Germans are very busy about the fame of your dear father," she writes; "there does not pass a month but something appears in print, and Dr. Groskopf saw it stated that Professor Pfaff had translated all your dear father's papers from the Phil. Trans. into German, and which will be published in Dresden. I wish he had left it for some good astronomer to do the same." Evidently the acid of her temper had been called into action by Professor Pfaff. Her nephew describes him in reply as "a respectable mathematician, and I hope it is he who undertakes the work." "Johann Wilhelm Pfaff," she answers, "professor, in Erlangen, is the same who intends to translate your father's papers, but those only which he can get a copy of. The Philosophical Transactions, I am told, are not within his reach." The acid is a little sweetened; not much, and it is clear that Caroline Herschel at eighty-five does not differ in temper at least from the same lady at twenty-two. Alas! her inventory of books, pictures, etc., showed what she thought of the Professor's two-volume edition of her brother's collected works, "Abominable stuff! What is to be done with them? They are so prettily bound, I cannot take it in my heart to burn them." But she could lash with her tongue everybody who