A more striking illustration of woman's helpfulness is afforded in the case of François Huber, the celebrated Swiss naturalist. Although blind from his seventeenth year, he was able to carry on researches requiring the keenest eyesight and the closest observation. This he was able to do through the affectionate coöperation of his devoted wife, Marie Aimée.
When her friends tried to dissuade her from marrying Huber, to whom she had been engaged for some time, saying he had become blind, her reply was worthy of her generous and noble nature: "He then needs me more than ever."
During the forty years of their married life her tenderness and devotion to her husband were as unfailing as they were inspiring. He worked through the eyes and hands of his wife as if they were his own. She was his reader, his observer, his secretary, his enthusiastic collaborator in all those investigations that have rendered him so famous. The blind man devised the experiments to be made, and the quick-witted wife executed them and recorded the observations which supplied the material for his epoch-making work on bees, entitled Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles. So accurate are his descriptions of the habits of the winged creatures, to the study of which he devoted the best years of his life, that one would think his great work was the production, not of a man who had been blind for a quarter of a century, when he wrote it, but of one who was gifted with exceptional keenness of vision and powers of observation.
"As long as she lived," exclaimed the great naturalist after his trusty Aimée's death, "I was not sensible of the misfortune of being blind." Nay, more. During her lifetime, when, though sightless, he was always so happy in his work, he went so far as to aver that he would be miserable were he to recover his eyesight. "I should not know," he declared, "to what an extent a person in my condition could be beloved. Besides, to me, my wife is always young, fresh and pretty, which is no light matter." He could truly say of her, as Wordsworth said of his sister Dorothy,
"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
...*...*...*...*
And love and thought and joy."
We hear much of the achievements of Galvani and Faraday in the domain of electricity and electromagnetism, but little is said of the women to whom they were so greatly indebted for their success and fame.
It was Galvani's wife who first directed his attention to the convulsions of a frog's leg when placed near an electrical machine. This induced him to make those celebrated investigations which led to the foundation of a new science which has ever since been identified with his name.
It was Mrs. Marcet's works on science—especially her Conversations on Chemistry—that inspired Faraday with a love of science and blazed for him that road in chemical and physical experimentation which led to such marvelous results. He was always proud to call her his first teacher, and never hesitated to attribute to her that taste for scientific research for which he became so preëminent. And it was his devoted wife who was not only a helpmate but a soulmate as well for nearly half a century, that had very much to do with the splendid development of the germ which had been placed in his youthful mind by Mrs. Marcet.