SKETCH OF MARY SOMERVILLE. 113 



trace and apprehend the thoughts of the printed page, through the 

 impression of the black lettering, this man received some finer im- 

 pression from the printed page than any we know ? 



In closing this short account of a remarkable individual, we would 

 only record one or two events prior to his birth, which afford some 

 little explanation of what appears in this man as arrested development. 

 His mother, not long before his birth, passed through a severe attack 

 of measles. This at the time was not reckoned in the account of 

 causes that might have unfavorably influenced the unborn child. One 

 thing, however, was recognized as the probable cause of a pre-natal 

 organic disturbance, viz., the fright of the mother by some hogs 

 kept on the farm. Herein we have a possible explanation of those 

 strange actions while eating, the peculiar grunt, the turning of the 

 head, and the listening attitude, which are frequently observed when 

 swine are feeding. 



SKETCH or MAEY SOMEEYILLE. 



'' A ITITHOUT forming what is ordinarily called an eventful 

 V V career," says an English essayist,* " the life of Mrs. Somer- 

 ville is marked by a degree of interest far beyond that which attaches 

 to the lives of many men and women who have shown more striking 

 traits of temperament and character. It is the unobtrusive record of 

 what can be done by the steady culture of good natural powers, and 

 the pursuit of a high standard of excellence, in order to win for a 

 woman a distinguished place in the sphere habitually reserved to men, 

 without parting with any of those characteristics of mind, or charac- 

 ter, or demeanor, which have ever been taken to form the grace and 

 glory of womanhood." " Nature " speaks of her as an illustrious 

 woman, "unique, or almost unique, from one point of view, though so 

 beautifully womanly from others." Sir Charles Lyell spoke of her, in 

 one of his letters (" Life," Vol. I, page 373), as " the first of women, 

 not of the blue." 



Mrs. SoMERViLLE was bom in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland, 

 December 26, 1780, and died at Sorrento, near Naples, November 29, 

 1872. Her father Avas Sir William George Fairfax, who commanded 

 the admiral's ship in the battle of Caraperdown, and was afterward 

 made a vice-admiral. There was nothing congenial in the surround- 

 ings of her childhood to the scientific pursuits for which she even 

 then seems to have had an inclination, and the influences under which 

 she lived were rather adverse to the gratification of her tastes in that 

 direction. Her earliest pictures of herself represent her as " a lonely 

 child picking up shells along the shore, ... or gathering wild-flow- 



* " Saturday Review," January 10, 1874. 



VOL. XXV. — 8 



