2 Mary Somerville. 



opinions on events she witnessed, or else as affording 

 some slight idea of her simple and loving disposition. 



Few thoughtful minds will read without emotion my 

 mother's own account of the wonderful energy and in- 

 domitable perseverance by which, in her ardent thirst for 

 knowledge, she overcame obstacles apparently insur- 

 mountable, at a time when women were well-nigh totally 

 debarred from education ; and the almost intuitive way in 

 which she entered upon studies of which she had scarcely 

 heard the names, living, as she did, among persons to 

 whom they were utterly unknown, and who disapproved 

 of her devotion to pursuits so different from those of 

 ordinary young girls at the end of the last century, 

 especially in Scotland, which was far more old-fashioned 

 and primitive than England. 



Nor is her simple account of her early days without 

 interest, when, as a lonely child, she wandered by the 

 seashore, and on the links of Burntisland, collecting 

 shells and flowers ; or spent the clear, cold nights at her 

 window, watching the starlit heavens, whose mysteries 

 she was destined one day to penetrate in all their pro- 

 found and sublime laws, making clear to others that 

 knowledge which she herself had acquired, at the cost of 

 so hard a struggle. 



It was not only in her childhood and youth that my 

 mother's studies encountered disapproval. Not till she 

 became a widow, had she perfect freedom to pursue them. 

 The first person indeed the only one in her earl}- days 

 who encouraged her passion for learning was her uncle 

 by marriage, afterwards her father-in-law, the Rev. Dr, 

 Somerville, minister of Jedburgh, a man very much in 

 advance of his century in liberality of thought on all 

 subjects. He was one of the first to discern her rare 



