MARIA MITCHELL. 331 



MARIA MITCHELL. 



Maria Mitchell was boru at Nantucket, Mass., August 1, 1818 ; 

 she was the third child of William and Lydia C. Mitchell, her mother's 

 maiden name having been Coleman. They were birthright members 

 of the Society of Friends, and descended from such on both sides for 

 several generations. Maria may well have inherited a taste and dis- 

 position for learning from a people whose fundamental " Discipline " 

 as far back as 1695 included the equal education of both sexes and all 

 classes. In 1737 it was " advised that Friends should instruct tlieir 

 children in French, High and Low Dutch, and Danish " ; but this 

 amendment to the "Discipline" (of English origin) was not suited 

 to the wants of islanders far off in the Western Ocean ; and so it 

 came to pass that the Nantucket Quakers substituted for these lan- 

 guages some rudiments of the sciences, especially those related to 

 navigation. 



At the beginning of this century the Nantucket whalers ventured 

 around Cape Florn, and stood out across the lonely Pacific Ocean, 

 where every refinement of skill and intelligence in observations of the 

 heavenly bodies was brought into requisition to trace their courses 

 over vast regions never before traversed. The study of navio-ation 

 became therefore the highest ambition of the Nantucket boy; and 

 since this science involves mathematics and astronomy, it was broad 

 enough to interest the other sex beyond the mere sympathy of com- 

 mon interests ; and thus arose in this isolated community an intel- 

 lectual excitement, the antithesis of its monotonous and repressive 

 religious system. Maria's mother used to tell how in her infancy 

 the little children were already taught to box the compass in the 

 " Monthly Meeting School " in place of the Catechism ; and her father 

 boasted that in the short period of his direction of the Howard Street 

 School he graduated two girls — one of whom was Maria's elder sister 

 Sally — who made "graphical predictions" of the eclipse of 1831, 

 then near at hand. 



It was this annular eclipse, described in the next year's American 

 Almanac as a " splendid spectacle," — " beautiful and sublime," — that 

 first called in the services of Maria Mitchell, as appears from the ac- 

 companying fac-simile of her father's observations at Vestal Street. 



We conjecture that the note signed " M. IM." was added after her 

 father's death, in 1869, at the time his papers were gathered up. 



Professor Mary W. Whitney, the able associate and successor of Miss 

 Mitchell at Vassar College, informs us that " the third return of the 



