150 JVOMAN IN SCIENCE 



any hitherto attempted, and her intellect was prepared, as 

 one of her scientific friends expressed it, ''for fixing the 

 limits of the infinite/' But while the world of science was 

 still sounding her praises and predicting for her still 

 greater triumphs in the field of analysis, it learned with 

 surprise and sorrow that she had bid adieu to those studies 

 in which she had achieved such extraordinary success, and 

 had consecrated her life to the service of the poor and the 

 afflicted. She disappeared completely from those literary 

 and scientific reunions where she had so long been the most 

 conspicuous figure, and was thenceforth known only as the 

 ministering angel of the suffering and the abandoned. For 

 half a century hers was a life of the most heroic charity 

 and self-abnegation. Very readily, therefore, we can un- 

 derstand why a recent representative of the scientific world 

 should desire to see her name placed on the calendar of 

 saints. 1 



Had Agnesi devoted her entire life to science instead of 

 abandoning it just when she was prepared to do her best 

 work, she might to-day be ranked among such supreme 

 mathematicians as Lagrange, Monge, Laplace and the Ber- 

 nouillis, all of whom were her contemporaries. Even as it 

 was, she has been placed beside Cardan, Leibnitz and Euler 

 for her remarkable powers of analysis of infinitesimals, 

 while the best proof of the literary value of her Instituzioni 

 Analitiche is the fact that it has been selected by the fa- 

 mous society Delia Crusca as a testo di lingua a work con- 

 sidered as a classic of its kind and used in the preparation of 

 the great authoritative dictionary of the Italian language. 



But by consecrating herself to charity she probably ac- 

 complished far more for humanity and for the well-being 

 of her sex than if she had elected to continue her work in 



i M. Rebi&re, in his Les Femmes dans la Science, p. 13, Paris, 

 1897, writes, "Ne pourrait-on aller plus loin et canonizer notre 

 Agnesi f J'estime, moi profane, que ce serait une sainte qui en 

 vaudrait bien d'autres." 



