146 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



eminent sister that they defied the traducers of their sex 

 muliebris sapientice inf ensissimis hostibus to continue any 

 longer their unreasonable campaign against the rights of 

 women which were based on the intellectual equality of the 

 two sexes. 



So highly did the French Academy of Science value Ag- 

 nesi's achievement that she would at once have been made 

 a member of this learned body had it not been against the 

 constitutions to admit a woman to membership. M. Mo- 

 tigny, one of the committee appointed by the Academy to 

 report on the work, in his letter to the author, among other 

 things, writes: " Permit me, Mademoiselle, to unite my 

 personal homage to the plaudits of the entire Academy. I 

 have the pleasure of making known to my country an ex- 

 tremely useful work which has long been desired, and which 

 has hitherto" both in France and in England "existed 

 only in outline. I do not know any work of this kind which 

 is clearer, more methodic or more comprehensive than your 

 Analytical Institutions. There is none in any language 

 which can guide more surely, lead more quickly, and con- 

 duct further those who wish to advance in the mathemat- 

 ical sciences. I admire particularly the art with which 

 you bring under uniform methods the divers conclusions 

 scattered among the works of geometers and reached by 

 methods entirely different. " 



As an indication of the exceptional merit of Agnesi's 

 work, even long after its publication in 1748, it suffices to 

 state that the second volume of the Instituzioni Analitiche 

 was translated into French in 1775 by Antelmy and anno- 

 tated by the Abbe Bossuet, a member of the French Acad- 

 emy and a collaborator of D 'Alembert on the mathematical 

 part of the famous Encyclopedic. 



A still greater proof of the estimation in which Agnesi's 

 work was held by men of science is the fact that it was 

 translated in its entirety into English by the Rev. John 

 Colton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the Univer- 



