I 



NATURE 



417 



THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1874 



MARY SOMERVILLE 



Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of 

 Mary Somo-ville, with Selections from her Corre- 

 spondence. By her daughter, Martha Somerville. 

 (London : John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1873.) 



XT would have been a lasting blot upon the biographers 

 of our time if such an illustrious woman as Mary 

 Somerville — a woman unique, or almost unique from 

 one point of view, though so beautifully womanly from 

 others — had been allowed to pass from among us 

 without a satisfactory memorial of her characteristic 

 thoughts, conversation, and domestic life. 



The " Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville" 

 will not satisfy those readers who may have hoped to 

 find in the autobiography of the author of the 

 " Mechanism of the Heavens " and the " Connection of 

 the Physical Sciences " any special expositions of Science 

 or practical hints for a successful method of scientific 

 training. The studied care with which Mrs. Somerville 

 avoided bringing scientific questions prominently forward 

 in conversation has been rigidly preserved in the story of 

 her life, where little or nothing is said of the processes by 

 which she attained so exceptional and distinguished a 

 place in the world of Science, and only passing references 

 are made to the extraordinary success that attended her 

 self-acquired knowledge. 



As the record of a life in which the fulfilment of all the 

 natural and conventional claims upon a woman's time was 

 combined with practical and theoretical pre-eminence in 

 the most abstruse departments of physical inquiry, no 

 book can, however, be more interesting and suggestive 

 than this volume, in which the personal recollections of 

 Mary Somerville are noted down for us by her own hand 

 and that of her daughter. The story of her life has, 

 moreover, the special interest that it may, with perhaps 

 equal justice, be made to yield arguments for and against 

 the claims advanced for women's equality to men in intel- 

 lectual capacity. The champions of such pretensions 

 may well point v/ith triumph to her achievements in the 

 higher branches of analytical geometry. Where, indeed, 

 could another instance be found of a person who, after 

 having had to ask, at the age of 16, the meaning of " the 

 x's and y's mixed with strange lines," which first excited 

 her notice in the pages of a magazine of fashion, should 

 unaided — for she was in all essentials a self-taught 

 mathematician — have been able to begin her career as an 

 author by producing a work like the *' Mechanism of the 

 Heavens," which still ranks as the best exposition that we 

 possess of Laplace's " Mecanique celeste " .' 



The approval which this work won from the first ma- 

 thematicians and physicists of the day seems to have 

 surprised no one more thoroughly than the writer herself, 

 who had carried on her studies with such unostentatious 

 industry within her own home, that she was scarcely con- 

 scious how exceptional were her attainments. And it 

 may be fairly said of her that by the publication rf the 

 "Mechanism of the Heavens," in 1831, she ^Luldenly 

 awoke, at the advanced age of S'; to find herself famous, 

 Vol. IX. — No. 231 



the one woman of her time, and perhaps of all times, for 

 whatever may be the advantages which are now happily 

 being placed within the reach of women for benefiting by 

 high scientific training, we can scarcely expect to meet 

 with many Mary Somervilles. Her genius was unique of 

 its kind, and wholly exceptional, and this fact seems to 

 have been frankly and generously admitted by all who 

 came in contact with her, who were capable of measurino- 

 the depths of her knowledge. But so successfully did she 

 conceal her learning under a delicate feminine exterior, a 

 shy manner, and the practical qualities of an efficient 

 mistress of a household, coupled with the graceful, artistic 

 accomplishments of an elegant woman of the world, that 

 ordinary visitors, who had sought her as a prodigy, came 

 away disappointed that she looked and behaved hke any 

 other materfamilias, and talked just like other people. 

 No one, therefore, could possibly have aftbrded a stronger 

 refutation of the axiom, almost universally upheld half a 

 century ago, that scientific acquirements of a high order 

 are wholly incompatible with the proper exercise of the 

 natural and ascribed functions of a woman's destiny. 

 And accordingly the name of Mary Somerville has always 

 been a tower of strength to the promoters of woman's 

 emancipation from the enactments established by man 

 for her exclusion from the enjoyment of the various 

 social, legal, intellectual, and other privileges, of which he 

 has so long had the virtual monopoly. 



Her fame did not rest only on her first book — in which 

 she had verified Laplace's own testimony, that she was 

 the only woman who had ever read his works, which, 

 moreover, were not understood by twenty men in France 

 as well as she understood them — for the list of her writings 

 includes, in addition to those more generally known from 

 their semi-popular form as the " Connection of the Phy- 

 sical Sciences," " Physical Geography," &c. ; monographs 

 on the Analytical Attraction of Spheroids, the Form and 

 Rotation of the Earth, the Tides of the Ocean and Atmo- 

 sphere, and, besides many others of equally abstruse 

 nature, a treatise of 246 pages on Curves and Surfaces of 

 the Second and Higher Orders, which she herself tells us 

 she wrote con amore, to fill up her morning-hours while 

 spending her winter in Southern Italy. A truly marvel- 

 lous catalogue raisonne of the results of a woman's know- 

 ledge and industry ! 



It is impossible to speak too highly of the sympathy 

 and hearty recognition of the value of her labours that 

 Mrs. Somerville received from all the most eminent of 

 her contemporaries. In France, Laplace, La Croix, 

 Biot Poisson, Arago, Ampere, and many others welcomed 

 her as one of themselves; in England she enjoyed the 

 intimate friendship of the Herschels, Lord Brougham, 

 Professors Whewell, Peacock, Babbage, Sedgwick, and 

 Brewster, and others pre-eminent in science ; and surely 

 no greater tribute could have been paid to the exceptional 

 intellectual superiority of Mary Somerville than that ren- 

 dered by the University of Cambridge when, at the 

 earnest recommendation of Profs. Whewell and Peacock, 

 her " Mechanism of the Heavens " was introduced into 

 the University studies as " essential to those students 

 who aspire to the highest places in the e.xaminations." 



It would not be easy to over-estimate the extent and 

 degree in which Mrs. Somerville's acquirements differed 

 from those of women generally at that period ; but then 



