Mary Fairfax Somerville

“ You receive great honors, my dear friend, but that which you confer on our sex is still greater, for, with talents and acquirements of masculine magnitude, you unite the most sensitive and retiring modesty of the female sex; indeed, I know not any woman, perhaps I might say any human being, who would support so much applause without feeling the weakness of vanity. ”

“ With all these labors, and this concentration of her mind on the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics, Mrs. Somerville shone in the domestic circle, and enjoyed society and its amusements. "In reading the personal recollections of this wonderful woman," says "Nature," "nothing strikes one more than the ordinary and even commonplace conditions under which her great intellect advanced to maturity. In her case, the only exceptional features were her natural gifts, and her perseverance in cultivating them. ”

“ After the 'Mechanism of the Heavens,' the philosophical 'Connection of the Physical Sciences' has been the object of my profound admiration.... The author of the rash 'Cosmos' should, more than any other one, salute the 'Physical Geography' of Mary Somerville. ... I do not know of a work on physical geography in any language that can compare with yours."
Her last work, "On Molecular and Microscopic Science," containing a summary of the most recent and abstruse investigations in that department, was published in 1869, when she was close upon her ninetieth year. ”

“ Although 'the one woman of her time, and perhaps of all times,' 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 like any other materfamilias, and talked just like other people. ”

“ She afterward obtained, through a tutor in the family, a Euclid and a Bonnycastle's "Algebra," and studied—herself being her only teacher—her geometry by stealth, reading late in the night after she had gone to bed. The servants reported to her mother that she was consuming candles extravagantly, and orders were given to take away her candle as soon as she was in bed. She had, however, already gone through the first six books of Euclid, and was now thrown on her memory. ”

“ Somerville was a member, and of honors she received, is a long one, and includes a number of American societies. She also had among her personal friends many men of chief distinction in American science and letters. ”

“ The interest which she takes in the most diverse branches of knowledge makes every one forward to bring her the first intelligence of anything new or of significance. Dr. Young is eager to submit an Egyptian horoscope he has that evening deciphered from a papyrus of the age of the Ptolemies ”