SKETCH OF MARIA AGNES I. 405 



the prescriptions too faithfully and too far, and balls and horseback 

 riding, instead of curing her, brought on convulsions. Her disorders 

 continued to increase iinmediatelj after the death of her mother, 

 March 13, 1732, but she was subsequently gradually restored to 

 quiet. This death gave rise to some changes in the family life, and 

 Maria's father, who had five daughters and two sons by his first wife, 

 was married a second time, February 23, 1734, to a Milanese lady, 

 Mariana Pezzi. Two children resulted from this union, which was 

 unfortunately brief, the second Madame Agnesi dying August 19, 

 1737, at the age of twenty- three years. 



As a means of consolation in the grief that had fallen upon her 

 fatlier's household, Agnesi extended the field of her knowledge, and 

 at last found her true' career in the cultivation of philosophy and 

 mathematics. She was not destined, it is true, to make a very 

 prominent mark, but simply to occupy a highly honorable place 

 among the great algebraists of the eighteenth century. Father 

 Manera, of Cremona, and Father Michaelo Casati, professor in the 

 Royal University at Turin, who was afterward (in 1754) nominated 

 Bishop of Moudoir, taught her logic, metaphysics, Euclid's elements, 

 and physics. She soon acquired great proficiency in all these sciences, 

 and sustained theses in the presence of qualified persons. In these 

 assemblies, after having discussed and refuted the arguments of her 

 antagonists, she was accustomed to express her own opinions in very 

 pure Latin. Her sister, Maria Teresa, an accomplished musician, 

 introduced the artistic element into these meetings, which at last 

 became so celebrated that princes and illustrious travelers passing 

 through Milan often attended them. Many persons retained pleasant 

 recollections of them, as is attested by the following passage from De 

 Brosses' Letters from Italy, which is cited in M. Robiere's excellent 

 book on Women in Science, and which we quote as the story of a 

 witness : " I would like to tell you, Mr. President, of a kind of 

 literary phenomenon I have recently witnessed, and which has 

 seemed to me something more stupendous than even the Duomo of 

 Milan, and at the same time I was not taken unawares. I have just 

 been to Signora Agnesi's, where I told you yesterday I was going. 

 I was introduced into a large apartment, where I found thirty 

 persons of all the European nations arranged in a circle, and Made- 

 moiselle Agnesi seated alone with her younger sister on a sofa. She 

 is eighteen or twenty years old, neither pretty nor plain, with a very 

 simple and pleasant expression. First, plenty of iced water was 

 brought in, which seemed to me a good augury. I was anticipating, 

 when I went in, only an ordinary conversation with the lady; but 

 instead of that. Count Belloni, with whom I was, now planned a 

 kind of public act. He began by making the young lady a fine 



