SCIENCE UP TO DATE

Evening Star, Issue 15481, 1 May 1914, Page 1

SCIENCE UP TO DATE

TWO WOMEN OF SCIENCE.

LXXV. [By James Collier.] [Special Rights Secured by the ' Star.'] Perhaps the most famous woman of science among our contemporaries was Soma Kovalevsky, a Russian. She was no pedant, nor did she "stick to her last, but her life of science was shot through with caprice, passion, and grief. At 13 years of age she fell in love with the Russian novelist Dostoievsky, thrice as old as herself, and epileptic from the severities of exile. At 17 she contracted a fictitious marriage in order to escape from the pater nai household and study in foreign universities. Wandering to Berlin, likeso many of her compatriots, in search of better mathematical teaching than she could find at Moscow or St. Petersburg, though one of the greatest mathematicians of re cent times, Lobatchevsky, was a Russian, she succeeded in solving problems set by Professor Weierstrass only to his most advanced students. Weierstrass was "the father of modern analysis," and he was 1 very proud of his pupil, whom he treated with paternal tenderness. Eventually Sonia (or Sophia) was appointed protessor of mathematics. in a Swedish university, and her accomplishments were as celebrated in Germany and France as in Sweden or Russia. Poor Sonia was cut off prematurely, distracted between her exacting science and the inner tragedy of hee own life. • She had won European fame, j and yet above all things she desired to be loved.

—-English Female Mathematicians.— England has not lacked mathematicians among its women. Mrs Somerville is celebrated, and her masterly adaptation of Laplace's classic may be compared with Harriet Martineau's condensed translation of Comte's 'Positive Philosophy,' more masculine than the original. Mrs Henry Sidgwick (worthy sister of Arthur Balfour) is so eminent as a mathematician that a long and abstruse paper of hers fills over 100 pages (if my memory rightly serves me) of the "Transactions of the Royal Society of London' about 1887. I presume that she was immediately elected a F.R.S., and her memoir was the journeyman's masterwork, as the old guilds woulcj have called it. The tradition created by these high experts has been since maintained, and at Cambridge, only a few years ago, Miss Philippa Fawcett, the brilliant daughter of the blind Postmaster-General, surpassed in the examination for honors the Senior Wrangler of the year. Women have often good mathematical heads. —Maria Agnesi.—

Not of these, however, but of two more distant figures are we to speak to-day. Their names will be new to most readers. Maria Agnesi was born at Milan in 1718. She came of a good stock and was highly educated. Like another Italian lady, ■ Cornelia Piscopia, she was vocal (as Moltke was silent) in seven languages before she was 20 years old. Her powers of application wera already prodigious, and she left in manuscript translations of Greek and Latin works and a Greek-Latin lexicon.' She soon acquired great proficiency in many branches, especially logic, metaphysics, geometry, and physics. But she was no solitary, who kept her acquisitions to herself, as Hypatia, after being disillusioned, declared that her knowledge should be for herself alone. In her father's house she conversed freely in a circle of 30 persons, and sustained as many as 190 theses philosophical in such assemblies. She corresponded with men of science, to one of whorii she sent the solution of a problem in analytical geometry. She revised the MSS. of their unpublished works, and commented on the " Conic Sections" of the Marquis de I'Hopital. —Later Labors.— Called back from a purpose or a dream of withdrawal to a convent, Maria was elected a member of the Academy of Bologna ?n 1748. Some months later she published her first remarkable work, " Ana- | lytica! Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth.' In the first volume the authoress treated of algebra and its applications to geometry, and in the second of the differential and integral calculus. The work had a flattering reception. The Pope praised it, the academics acclaimed it, and the French and English translated it. The book was reported on by the Academy of Sciences at Paris as " the most complete and best-composed treatise" extant on that difficult subject, and it is said to have superseded the works of L'Hopital and Father Reyneau. A substantial reward and a high honor weTe conferred on her. In 1750 Pope Benedict appointed her professor of mathematics in the University of Bologna—perhaps the first lady professor the world had seen since the martyred Hypatia of Alexandria, also a mathematician. But Maria never publicly taught, and two years later she definitely gave up scientific 'work. She was only 32 years old. What had happened? A strong inclination to retire from the world and live wholly for God, which she had almost yielded to a dozen years earlier, again gained the upper hand. Her remaining years. 47 in number, she devoted to labors of charity and beneficence, and she composed ■ theological and religious books. Early in 1799 she c-ied of dropsy. Her theses, already referred to. have been pubI lished.- but many of her works —' MetaI phvsics and Phvs'ics.' 'Physics and Mathe- ! matics,' ' Studies in Cosmography,' etc. — still lie in manuscript hi the Ambrosian. Library at Milan. Her influence on mathematical science may have been real and intensive, if not very extensive. By general acknowledgment r.-he held a high place among the mathematicians of her time. —Clemence Rover.— A generation later another Catholic lady madc serious contribution? to less exact sciences. Clemence Augustine Rover wae born at Nantes oh April 21. 1830. She was educated at a convent, but soon after she left it sh<s abandoned the religion in which she had been reared. In 1850 she visited England, and resided there for some time, poss : bly as a teacher of French, and there she qualified herself as a translator from the English language. Some vears later she settled in Switzerland, where she found her vocation as a lecturer and a writer. In 1858-59 she delivered a course of lectures to women at Lausanne on the ambitious topic of logic. She collaborated with Paul Duprat on the 'New Economist,' and she divided with the .famous Proudhon the prize given for an essay on taxation.

—Translator of Darwin.—

Mile Royer for Mmc Rover, as she got to be called, like elderly housekeepers in good English, families) brought herself conspicuously into notice by translating the 'Origin of Species' into English threeyeare after its first To it she prefixed a masterly introduction. She rightly refuses to place Darwin by the side o*f Cuvier as an expositor, and Darwin, in his humility, would have accepted the lower place.' But she does him full justice by recognising that Darwin, and not Cuvier, was the great constructive intellect in natural history, and she justly ranks him with. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. a Darwinian before his time, as a thinker of the same exalted stamp. —'Origin of Man and Society.'—

How completely Mme Royer had mastered the various Darwinian doctrines is plain front the treatise into which that introduction, was expanded. In 1870 «be

published, her chief work, 'The Origin of Man and Societies.' It is more than 3C years since I read the book, but I have still, at this distance of time, a vivid impression of its solidity, its ingenuity, and its lucidity. Neither in Engtah nor in German had so clear and compendious an exposition of Darwinism appesrsd, nor had ite application to the problems of anthropology and sociology been anywhere else discerned or so convincingly ehown. —Variability.—

Perhaps first among the expositor* of Darwin, Mme Doyer, though no naturalist by profession, recognised the importance' of variation in plant and animal species and its significance for the theory of Darwinism. She perceives it to be the counternart of heredity, which often shows iteelf as atavism, or* the throwing back of the to the form or character of an earlier generation. This assures the continuance of the type, and is eminently the confiervative force, while variability is the force of innovation and progress, and is the key to the development of species.- It has its laws. The first and perhaps the most assured is correlation of growth. Homologous organs tend to vary in the same direction and together. So early had this

untrained writer ascertained one of the

most important laws of variation, all unaware that it was to be one of the pillars of Darwinism and a, battlefield of controversy. —Natural {selection.— A second law is compensation of growth, as when an organ is atrophied to supply the energy demanded by a freshly developed organ. A third is that tike- newvariation must be adapted to some change in the outward environment, if it is to survive. On the back of these comee natural selection, which operates on the variations thus brought to the birth. At a time when fee acute an intellect as that of Samuel Butler could eee notihinß in Darwinism but development, this untutored Frenchwoman clearly perceived and fully realised the all-importance of the peat characteristic Darwinian agency. Its chiei instrument is the struggle for existence, and the potency of this supreme factor Mme Koyer also plainly discerned. Only thosfe varieties that are adapted to their conditions axe preserved, and all the intermediate varieties are destroyed—or rather, we should now say, they are left to perish.

—Origin of Life.— Mine Rojer is now brought face to face with the formidable problem of the-origin of life, and she boldly tackles it. Go back, she savs, thousands of thousands of centuries, "and you shall find a thin crust ot red-hot lava, not yet fully solidified, coverinc up the incandescent nucleus of our globe. Uncounted ages passed. before the riery core was imprisoned withm its granite 'sarcophagus. The chemical elements, metals and metalloids, seethed ant floated under a canopy of aqueous vapor*. Aiter millions of years these vapors condensed into oceans. In these oceans arose the first forms of life, anomalous, monstrous, abortive. According to Mme Rover, the first germs of life came into existence on " the thick proliferous stratum that was developed under the pressure of a dense atmosphere in contact with liquids still warm, incessantly traversed by electric currents of unimaginable intensity. In many places life thus shot up, but only a small number of such germs achieved a beginning of vegetation. Geological ages were still needed to purify the atmosphere from its acrid vapors and the seas irom their foreign matters."'

—Origin of Man.— a time when Darwin himself had not yet affiliated the human species on animal species, Mme Rover had the courage ta trace the evolution of humanity out of animalitv: She followed the slow, successive modifications of the animal frame, and, after Huxley, she correlated the anatomical structure of man w ' ith tnat oi tho apes Man. she thus early affirmed, is but the last of the primates, and she professes to prove that the mental and moral powers of man are but the development of the same faculties in his lowly ancestors. Differentiating and classifying tho various human stocks, she arrives at the conclusion that the negro race is the oldest, and ha* been much longer than any of the others separated from the common stock. It was a hazardous speculation 45 years ago, but it is now the conclusion of leading ethnologists. —Origin of Language.— A large section of the work is given to a theory of the beginnings of speech. Or. this subject Mme Rover's views are scientific and advanced. The savage has, at first-. '"no language but a. cry,*' and that, through thousands of years, is shaped and hewn into articulate sounds, and made ever more expressive. It is gradually broker up into a variety of sounds. Not a few oi these were imitative, for Mme Royer re fuses to abandon the "'bow-wow theory." "The relations of puce, possession, and those of many other kinds were probably expressed by" the lock, the attitude, a motion of the hand, etc. She thus anticipates the theory of the gesture origin of 'language, since elaborated by Tylor and Wallace. She also anticipates tnc theory of Sayce that the formation of languages is a consequence, of the growth and complexity of social relation.",. For the same reason the creation of the first elements of language was posterior to the geographical and ethnical separation of the peoples that spoke them. Uefore ever they conquered the, faculty of speech, the various stocks had acquired the anatomical differences that distinguish them. —Her Later Life.— It would be interesting to give the gist of a section on the origin of society, which abounds in new and ingenious views; but this article is already long enough. We will only note some- incidents in the later years of" Mme Royer. She published many memoirs in the transactions of learned societies. She contributed to various periodicals. She published volumes oi. Zoroaster, 'Prehistoric Ages,' and 'The Earth and Its Ancient Inhabitants.' Her fame grew. In 1897 she was entertained at a jubilee banquet, which M. Levasseur, of the Institute, declared to be "a glorification of woman's knowledge.'' Her remaining years were passed in a retinal founded by the Duchess Gaiigani at "S'euilly, near Paris.