208 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



one who had already bound me to her car by all the chains 

 of esteem and admiration." 1 



Like so many of her gifted sisters of sunny Italy, Laura 

 was in every way "a perfect woman nobly planned. " Of 

 a deeply religious nature, she was as pious as she was intel- 

 ligent, and was throughout her life the devoted friend of 

 the poor and the afflicted. The mother of twelve children, 

 she never permitted her scientific and literary work to con- 

 flict with her domestic duties or to detract in the least 

 from the singular affection which so closely united her to 

 her husband and children. She was as much at home with 

 the needle and the spindle as she was with her books and 

 the apparatus of her laboratory. And she was equally 

 admirable whether superintending her household, looking 

 after her children, entertaining the great and the learned 

 of the world, or in holding the rapt attention of her stu- 

 dents in the lecture room. She was, indeed, a living proof 

 that higher education is not incompatible with woman's 

 natural avocations ; and that cerebral development does not 

 lead to race suicide and all the other dire results attributed 

 to it by a certain class of our modern sociologists and anti- 

 feminists. 



Considering her manifold duties as a professor in the 

 university and the mother of a large family, it was scarcely 

 to be expected that Laura Bassi would have much time for 

 writing for the press. She was, however, able to devote 

 some of her leisure moments to the cultivation of the Muses, 

 of whom, Fantuzzi informs us, she was a favorite. Her 

 verses, as well as her contributions to the science of physics, 

 are scattered through various publications, but they suffice 

 to show that the accounts of her transmitted to us by her 

 contemporaries were not exaggerated. 2 



1 Ernesto Masi, Studi e Eitratti, p. 166 et seq., Bologna, 1881. 



2 Two of her Latin dissertations on certain physical problems 

 were published in the Commentaries of the Bologna Institute. One 

 of them is entitled De Problemate quodam MecJianico; the other De 



