144 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



11 Venetian Minerva," called Oracolo Settilingue Oracle 

 of Seven Languages. 1 



But it was in the higher mathematics that Maria Gaetana 

 was to win her chief title to fame in the world of learning. 

 So successful had she been in her prosecution of this branch 

 of science that she was, at the early age of twenty, able to 

 enter upon her monumental work Le Instituzioni Anali- 

 tiche a treatise in two large quarto volumes on the dif- 

 ferential and integral calculus. To this difficult task she 

 devoted ten years of arduous and uninterrupted labor. 

 And if we may credit her biographer, she consecrated the 

 nights as well as the days to her herculean undertaking. 

 For frequently, after working in vain on a difficult prob- 

 lem during the day, she was known to bound from her bed 

 during the night while sound asleep and, like a somnambu- 

 list, make her way through a long suite of rooms to her 



i M. Charles de Brosses, in his Lettres Familieres ecrites de 

 ritalie en 1739 et 1740, speaks of Agnesi in terms that recall the 

 marvelous stories which are related of Admirable Crichton and Pico 

 della Mirandola. "She appeared to me," he tells us, "something 

 more stupendous una cosa piu stupenda than the Duomo of 

 Milan." Having been invited to a conversazione for the purpose of 

 meeting this wonderful woman, the learned Frenchman found her 

 to be a "young lady of about eighteen or twenty." She was sur- 

 rounded by l ' about thirty people many of them from different 



parts of Europe." The discussion turned on various questions of 

 mathematics and natural philosophy. 



"She spoke," writes de Brosses, "wonderfully well on these sub- 

 jects, though she could not have been prepared beforehand any more 

 than we were. She is much attached to the philosophy of Newton; 

 and, it is marvelous to see a person of her age so conversant with 

 such abstruse subjects. Yet, however much I was surprised at the 

 extent and depth of her knowledge, I was still more amazed to hear 



her speak Latin with such purity, ease and accuracy, that I 



do not recollect any book in modern Latin written in so classical 



a style as that in which she pronounced these discourses The 



conversation afterwards became general, everyone speaking in the 

 language of his own country, and she answering in the same lan- 

 guage ; for, her knowledge of languages is prodigious. ' ; 



