Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/528

510, the author of many books, and the translator into French of the works of Newton; the beautiful Mademoiselle Delaunay, student of astronomy, geometry, physics, and anatomy; and others less distinguished.

A little later we read of Madame Lavoisier, who assisted her husband in his chemical experiments, learning English and German in order to translate for him the scientific works written in those languages, as well as engraving, in order to be able to illustrate his writings; the plates in his treatise of Elementary Chemistry all bear her signature. Madame Lavoisier was very beautiful, and her face is familiar to all through the celebrated portrait by David, which represents her standing behind her husband as he sits at his worktable. After the death of Lavoisier, who perished on the guillotine, his widow married Count Rumford, and lived to a great age.

Sophie Germain, born in 1776, is another French woman noted as a mathematician; she has been called one of the creators of mathematical physics. Her tomb at Père-la-Chaise is still often decked with fresh flowers. A high school for girls and a street in Paris have been named in her honor.

The recently published memoirs of Sophie Kowalevski have shown the difficulties which a Russian woman has to overcome in order to obtain the higher education, and they are also most pathetic, showing that neither science and learning nor the honors they bring can satisfy the deepest longing of a woman's heart. Full as are the pages of the record of her intellectual achievements, and the brilliant success of her genius, they are none the less the record of an unsatisfied and empty life.

Monsieur Rebière does full justice to the fame of Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, and our own Maria Mitchell, whose names and achievements are too well known to need mention here, and he also gives short biographies of many women now engaged in scientific pursuits in England and America: among them Miss Agnes Mary Gierke, author of many important works on astronomy; Miss Charlotte Angas Scot, one of the great living mathematicians, born in England, and now professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr; Mrs. Ladd-Franklin, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, not only noted as a mathematician, but as a student of logic and physiology; and others. An interesting account is given of Miss Dorothea Klumpke, born in San Francisco, and to-day "one of the foremost astronomers of France," where she is on the staff of the Observatory of Paris.

In studying the lives of those women who have been distinguished in science we are forced to the conclusion that their genius has but a limited field; while many have obtained fame through