Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/569

Rh caught her first view of a new comet from the stateroom window-. [sic] She at once hurried back to Poughkeepsie to make her observations. An apple tree was in the way, and she had it cut down. Then a mist arose, and the observation had to be postponed. On account of the incident of the tree, the girls called her George Washington.

During her later years at Vassar, Miss Mitchell endeavored to raise a fund to endow the chair of astronomy. The fund was completed after her death, amounting to fifty thousand dollars, and is known as the Maria Mitchell Endowment Fund. It was her custom every year, in the week before commencement, to give her students a "dome party"—a breakfast—in the observatory, and these were most enjoyable occasions to all.

Miss Mitchell was chairman of the Standing Committee on Woman's Work in Science of the American Association for the Advancement of Women, and was for several years president of the association. "Some of her students did their first work for women's organizations in gathering statistics and filling out blanks which she distributed among them." She believed in the woman suffrage movement, but took no prominent part in it. She was the first woman elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston. She was chosen in 1859 a member of the American Philosophical Society; was for many years a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; was connected with the New England Women's Club and with Sorosis; and received degrees from Rutgers Fe. male College, Hanover College, and Columbia College. She contributed a paper on Mary Somerville to the Atlantic Monthly in 1860; articles, mostly on observations of Jupiter and Saturn, to the American Journal of Science; a few popular science papers in Hours at Home; and an article on The Herschels was printed in The Century just after her death. She also read a few lectures to small societies and to one or two girls' schools, "but she never allowed such outside work to interfere with her duties at Vassar College." She resigned her position in Vassar College, on account of growing infirmity, in January, 1888, after having, as she boasted, earned a salary, without any intermission, for more than fifty years. The trustees made her professor emeritus, and offered her a home in the observatory, but she preferred to spend the few remaining months of her life with her family in Lynn.

It is partly a result of Miss Mitchell's work that woman astronomers are now no longer regarded as something remarkable.