WOMEN IN ASTRONOMY 



193 



her death her countrymen have recognized the value of her 

 contributions to science by erecting a statue to her memory. 



Another woman who has won enduring fame in the an- 

 nals of astronomy is Miss Dorothea Klumpke, of San Fran- 

 cisco. "While yet quite young, she and her sisters were 

 taken to Europe to be educated. There she soon became 

 proficient in a number of languages, and then devoted her- 

 self to the study of mathematics and astronomy. After 

 securing her baccalaureate and licentiate in Paris, she ap- 

 plied for admission as a student to the Paris observatory. 

 "The directors of the observatory consulted the statutes. 

 No woman had hitherto proposed herself as a colleague, but 

 there was no rule opposing it. They themselves approved, 

 and gave her a telescope to make her own observations. 

 After a time she completed the work begun by Mme. 

 Kovalevsky on the rings of Saturn, which she made the 

 subject of her thesis, and, when she had become Doctor of 

 Science, she was given a decoration by the Institute and 

 made an Officier de V Academic." 



After Miss Klumpke had brilliantly defended her thesis 

 in the Sorbonne, M. Darboux, the president of the jury, 

 complimented the young American doctor on her splendid 

 work and concluded a notable address in her honor in the 

 following laudatory words: 



' ' The great names of Galileo, of Huyghens, of Cassini, of 

 Laplace, without speaking of those of my illustrious col- 

 leagues and friends, are attached to the history of every 

 serious step forward made in this attractive and difficult 

 theory of Saturn's rings. Your work constitutes another 

 valuable contribution to the same subject and places you 

 in an honorable rank beside those women who have conse- 

 crated themselves to the study of mathematics. In the last 

 century Maria Agnesi gave us a treatise on the differential 

 and integral calculus. Since then Sophie Germain, as re- 

 markable for her literary and philosophical talent as for 

 her faculty for mathematics, won the esteem of the great 



