Maria Mitchell

“ I know I shall be called heterodox, and that unseen lightning flashes and unheard thunderbolts will be playing around my head, when I say that women will never be profound students in any other department except music while they give four hours a day to the practice of music. I should by all means encourage every woman who is born with musical gifts to study music; but study it as a science and an art, and not as an accomplishment ”

“ I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then thinking she was an astronomer! ”

“ There is a dialogue in some of the old school-readers, and perhaps in some of the new, between a tutor and his two pupils who had been out for a walk. One pupil complained that the way was long, the road was dusty, and the scenery uninteresting; the other was full of delight at the beauties he had found in the same walk. One had walked with his eyes intellectually closed; the other had opened his eyes wide to all the charms of nature. In some respects we are all, at different times, like each of these boys: we shut our eyes to the enjoyments of nature, or we open them. ”

“ Persons who observe an eclipse of the sun always try to do the impossible. They seem to consider it a solemn duty to see the first contact of sun and moon. The moon, when seen in the daytime, looks like a small faint cloud; as it approaches the sun it becomes wholly unseen; and an observer tries to see when this unseen object touches the glowing disc of the sun. ”

“ To her students: "I cannot expect to make astronomers, but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking.... When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.
"... But star-gazing is not science. The entrance to astronomy is through mathematics. You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work. You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly....
"The phrase 'popular science' has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific. ”

“ Can the study of truth do harm? Does not every true scientist seek only to know the truth? And in our deep ignorance of what is truth, shall we dread the search for it?
"I hold the simple student of nature in holy reverence; and while there live sensualists, despots, and men who are wholly self-seeking, I cannot bear to have these sincere workers held up in the least degree to reproach. ”

“ A wealthy gentleman buys a telescope as he would buy a library, as an ornament to his house.
"Admiral Smyth says that no family is quite civilized unless it possesses a copy of some encyclopaedia and a telescope. The English gentleman uses both for amusement. If he is a man of philosophical mind he soon becomes an astronomer, or if a benevolent man he perceives that some friend in more limited circumstances might use it well, and he offers the telescope to him, or if an ostentatious man he hires some young astronomer of talent, who comes to his observatory and makes a name for him. ”

“ I am not afraid that these girls could not read, for every American girl reads, and to read is much more important than to cook; but I am afraid that not all can write—some of them were not more than twelve years old.
"And what of the boys? Must a common cook always be a girl? and must a boy not cook unless on the top of the ladder, with the pay of the president of Harvard College?
"I am jealous for the schools; I have heard a gentleman who stands high in science declare that the cooking schools would eventually kill out every literary college in the land—for women. But why not for men? ”

“ There are cultivated and educated women who enjoy cooking; so there are cultivated men who enjoy Kensington embroidery. Who objects? But take care that some rousing of the intellect comes first,—that it may be an enlightened choice,—and do not so fill the day with bread and butter and stitches that no time is left for the appreciation of Whittier, letting at least the simple songs of daily life and the influence of rhythm beautify the dreary round of the three meals a day. ”

“ My students used to say that my way of teaching was like that of the man who said to his son, 'There are the letters of the English alphabet—go into that corner and learn them.'
"It is not exactly my way, but I do think, as a general rule, that teachers talk too much! A book is a very good institution! To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing. The fashion of lecturing is becoming a rage; the teacher shows herself off, and she does not try enough to develop her pupils. ”

“ The guide took a lower seat, and his dirty tin cup, swung across his breast, looked like an ornament as the light struck it; his swarthy face was bright, and I wondered what our friends at home would give for a picture.
"One of these elliptical halls has its ceiling immensely far off, and of the deepest black, until our feeble little lights strike upon innumerable points, when it shines forth like a dark starlight night. The stars are faint, but they look so exceedingly like the heavens that one easily forgets that it is not reality. ”

“ There is, on the one hand, the Irish woman who is disappointed because you cannot tell fortunes, and, on the other hand, the cultivated woman who supposes that you must know all science.
"I have a friend who wonders that I do not take my astronomical clock to pieces. She supposes that because I am an astronomer, I must be able to be a clock-maker, while I do not handle a tool if I can help it! She did not expect to take her piano to pieces because she was musical! She was as careful not to tinker it as I was not to tinker the clock, which only an expert in clock-making was prepared to handle. ”

“ I never saw, I thought, so many ruddy faces as met me at once in Liverpool. Dirty children in the street have red cheeks and good teeth. Nowhere did I see little children whose minds had outgrown their bodies. They do not live in the school-room, but in the streets. One continually meets little children carrying smaller ones in their arms; little girls hand in hand walk the streets of London all day. There are no free schools, and they have nothing to do. ”

“ Day after day alone in her studio, she studied the subject. Think what knowledge of the country, of the history of the people, must be gathered, must be moulded, to bring into the face and bearing of its queen the expression of the race! Think what familiar acquaintance with the human form, to represent a lifelike figure at all! ”

“ Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered. ”

“ Somerville as a woman. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science had not unfitted her for the drawing-room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of wife and mother; the mind that has turned to rigid demonstration has not thereby lost its faith in those truths which figures will not prove. ”

“ If I have lost some friends by death, I have not lost all. If I have worked harder than I felt that I could bear, how much better is that than not to have as much work as I wanted to do. I have earned more money than in any preceding year; I have studied less, but have observed more, than I did last year. I have saved more money than ever before, hoping for Europe in 1856." ...
Miss Mitchell from her earliest childhood had had a great desire to travel in Europe. She received a very small salary for her services in the Atheneum, but small as it was she laid by a little every year. ”

“ She touched upon the recent discoveries in chemistry or the discovery of gold in California, of the nebulae, more and more of which she thought might be resolved, and yet that there might exist nebulous matters, such as compose the tails of comets, of the satellites, of the planets, the last of which she thought had other uses than as subordinates. She spoke with disapprobation of Dr. Whewell's attempt to prove that our planet was the only one inhabited by reasoning beings; she believed that a higher order of beings than ourselves might people them. ”

“ All the early observatories of Europe seem to have been built as temples to Urania, and not as working-chambers of science. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the Imperial Observatory of Paris, and the beautiful structure on Calton Hill, Edinboro', were at first wholly useless as observatories. That of Greenwich had no steadiness, while every pillar in the astronomical temple of Edinboro', though it may tell of the enlightenment of Greece, hides the light of the stars from the Scottish observer. ”

“ Still, with all the school-masters, and all the teaching, and all the books, the ignorance of the unscientific world is enormous; they are ignorant both ways—they underrate the scientific people and they overrate them. ”

“ If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist? Do you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of study of something for which you were born? ”

“ I read this morning an article in 'Putnam's Magazine,' on Rachel. I have been much interested in this woman as a genius, though I am pained by the accounts of her career in point of morals, and I am wearied with the glitter of her jewelry. Night puts on a jewelled robe which few admire, compared with the admiration for marketable jewelry. The New York 'Tribune' descends to the rating of the value of those worn by her, and it is the prominent point, or rather it makes the multitude of prominent points, when she is spoken of. ”

“ One woman has opened a correspondence with me, and several have told me that they knew friends of mine; two have spoken of me in small letters to small newspapers; one said he didn't see me, and one said he did! I have become hardened to all; neither compliment nor quarter-dollar rouses any emotion. My fit of humility, which has troubled me all summer, is shaken, however, by the first cool breeze of autumn and the first walk taken without perspiration. ”

“ Sir John is like the elder Mr. Bond, except that he talks more readily; but he is womanly in his nature, not a tyrant like Whewell. Sir John is a better listener than any man I have met in England. He joins in all the chit-chat, is one of the domestic circle, and tells funny little anecdotes. (So do Whewell and Airy.)
The Herschels know Abbot Lawrence and Edward Everett—and everywhere these two have left a good impression. But I am certainly mortified by anecdotes that I hear of "pushing" Americans. ”

“ A good observer will remain in the dark for a short time before he makes a delicate observation on a faint star, and will then throw a cap over his head to keep out strong lights.
"When we look at the sun, we at once try to deaden its light. We protect our eyes by dark glasses—the less of sunlight we can get the better. We calculate exactly at what point the moon will touch the sun, and we watch that point only. The exact second by the chronometer when the figure of the moon touches that of the sun, is always noted. ”