After Mrs. Somerville's death, in 1872, at the advanced age of ninety-two, the number of women who devoted themselves to the study and teaching of physics was greatly augmented. The brilliant success of Laura Bassi and Mary Somerville had not been without results, and their notable achievements as authors and teachers had the effect of stimulating women everywhere to emulate their example, and encouraging them to devote more attention to a branch of science which, until then, had been regarded by the general public as beyond the sphere and capacity of what was assumed to be the intellectually weaker sex.
One of the most eminent scientific women of the present day in England is Mrs. Ayrton, the wife of the late Professor W. E. Ayrton, the well-known electrician. Her chosen field of research, like that of her husband, has been electricity, in which she has achieved marked distinction. Her investigations on the electric arc and on the sand ripples of the seashore won for her the first medal ever awarded to a woman by the Royal Society. When, however, in 1902, she was formally nominated for fellowship in this same society, she failed of election because the council of the society discovered that "it had no legal power to elect a married woman to this distinction."
How different it was in the case of Laura Bassi, who was an active member of all the leading scientific and literary societies of Italy, where from time immemorial women have been as cordially welcomed to membership in its learned societies as to the chairs of its great universities.
The list of the women who in Europe and America are now engaged in physical research and in teaching physics in schools and colleges is a long one, and the work accomplished by them is, in many cases, of a high order of merit. It is only, indeed, during the present generation that such work has been made generally accessible to them; and, considering the success which has already attended their efforts in this branch of science, we have every reason to believe that the future will bring forth many others of their sex who will take rank with such intellectual luminaries as Hypatia, Mme. du Châtelet, Laura Bassi and Mary Somerville.
FOOTNOTES:
[151] "Publice philosophiam naturalem et moralem in scholis Academiisque Atticis docuit hæc fœmina annis XXXV, libros composuit XL, discipulos habuit philosophos CX, obiit anno ætatis LXXVII, cui tale Athenienses statuere epitaphium:
Nobilis hic Arete dormit, lux Helladis, ore
Tyndaris at tibi par, Icarioti, fide.
Patris Aristippi calamumque animamque dederunt,
Socratis huic linguam Mæonidaeque Dii."
—Boccaccio, De Laudibus Mulierum, Lib. II.
Cf. Wolf's Mulierum Græcarum quæ Oratione Prosa Usæ Sunt Fragmenta et Elogia, pp. 283 et seq., London, 1739.
[152] "Mulier quædam fuit Alexandriæ, nomine Hypatia, Theonis filia. Hæc ad tantam eruditionem pervenerat ut omnes sui temporis philosophos longo intervallo superaret, et in Platonicam scholam a Plotino deductam succederet, cunctasque philosophiæ disciplinas auditoribus exponeret. Quocirca omnes philosophiæ studiosi ad illam undique confluebant." Socrates, Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ, Lib. VII, Cap. 15.
[153] For extracts from the ancient authors regarding Hypatia, as well as for the extant letters to her from her friend and pupil, Synesius, the reader is referred to Wolf's erudite Mulierum Græcarum quæ Oratione Prosa Usæ sunt Fragmenta et Elogia, pp. 72-91, ut sup.