Our excellent president, in his address, has informed you of the appropriation of two of your gold medals since our last anniversary:—a third, however, has been decreed by your council; and when it is known that Miss Caroline Herschel is the individual to whom it stands adjudged, it is not difficult to determine why the president has avoided the slightest allusion to it. But that your Council has not selected one from the many of its members infinitely more competent to do justice to the transcendent merits of that illustrious lady is most assuredly matter of regret. I must therefore throw myself upon your indulgence, hoping that the goodness of the cause may in some measure compensate for the inability of its advocate. The labours of Miss Herschel are so intimately connected with, and are generally so dependent upon, those of her illustrious brother, that an investigation of the latter is absolutely necessary ere we can form the most remote idea of the extent of the former. But when it is considered that Sir W. Herschel’s contributions to astronomical science occupy sixty-seven memoirs, communicated from time to time to the Royal Society, and embrace a period of forty years, it will not be expected that I should enter into their discussion. To the Philosophical Transactions I must refer you, and shall content myself with the hasty mention of some of her more immediate claims to the distinction now conferred. To deliver an eulogy (however deserved) upon _his_ memory is not the purpose for which I am placed here. His first catalogue of new nebulæ and clusters of stars, amounting in number to one thousand, was made from observations with the twenty-foot reflector in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785. A second thousand was furnished by means of the same instrument in 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788; while the places of 500 others were discovered between 1788 and 1802. But when we have thus enumerated the results obtained in the course of _sweeps_ with this instrument, and taken into consideration the extent and variety of the other observations which were at the same time in progress, a most important part yet remains untold. Who participated in his toils? Who braved with him the inclemency of the weather? Who shared his privations? A female. Who was she? His sister. Miss Herschel it was who by _night_ acted as his amanuensis: she it was whose pen conveyed to paper his observations as they issued from his lips; she it was who noted the right ascensions and polar distances of the objects observed; she it was who, having passed the night near the instrument, took the rough manuscripts to her cottage at the dawn of day and produced a fair copy of the night’s work on the following morning; she it was who planned the labour of each succeeding night; she it was who reduced every observation, made every calculation; she it was who arranged everything in systematic order; and she it was who helped him to obtain his imperishable name.