For this the Royal Astronomical Society voted her the gold medal, and gave her the unusual distinction of honorary membership.
Sixteen years after her return to Hanover, Sir John Herschel, her nephew, who had made his wonderful review of the southern heavens, discovering as many new nebulæ as his father, took his only boy, Willie, to see her.
She was now eighty-eight. The visit was overwhelming to her affectionate heart. She watched the child with the most intense delight. Fearing the results if she knew the time of their departure for England, Sir John, with mistaken kindness, went away at four o'clock in the morning, without saying good-by. But the anguish of separation was thereby rendered greater.
The years went by slowly. On her ninety-sixth birthday the King of Prussia sent her a gold medal, Alexander von Humboldt writing her a letter from Berlin to accompany it.
January 14, 1848, at the age of almost ninety-eight, Caroline Herschel died, and was buried from the same garrison church where nearly a century before she had been christened. In her coffin was placed, by her desire, a lock of her brother's hair. Beautiful affection! great co-workers in their immortal study of unnumbered worlds!
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.
The great Agassiz, in his eloquent address, in Boston, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Humboldt, said: "All the fundamental facts of popular education in physical science, beyond the merest elementary instruction, we owe to him. We are reaping daily in every school throughout the broad land, where education is the heritage of the poorest child, the intellectual harvest sown by him.
"There is not a text-book of geography, or a school atlas in the hands of our children to-day, which does not bear, however blurred and defaced, the impress of his great mind. But for him our geographies would be mere enumerations of localities and statistics. He first suggested the graphic methods of representing natural phenomena which are now universally adopted. The first geological sections, the first sections across an entire continent, the first averages of climate illustrated by lines, were his. Every school-boy is familiar with his methods now, but he does not know that Humboldt is his teacher...."
Naturally we ask how such a man rose to fame, and what incited him to stand among the few intellectual leaders of the world.