Abstract
Mary Somerville already had an established international reputation as a physical scientific thinker long before she actually published her first words in 1826. As we have seen, it was through the verbal and epistolary channels of the age that she had first won fame in Edinburgh, London, Paris, Geneva, and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
Mary Somerville mentions her friendships with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Marcet in Personal Recollections (London, 1873), 114 and 156. Maria Edgeworth, moreover, left a graphic description of Sir John Herschel operating his 20-foot reflecting telescope in the dark, during which ‘Herschel runs up and down the ladder like a cat (because I would not say a monkey)’, in her 1831 account to Harriet Butler, reprinted in Christina Colvin, ed., Maria Edgeworth. Letters from England 1813–1844 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971), 506. See also Mary T. Brück, ‘Maria Edgeworth: Scientific ‘Literary Lady”, Irish Astronomical Journal, 23, 1 (1996), 49–54.
- 2.
See present work, Chap. 3, notes 27 and 31.
- 3.
Henry, Lord Brougham and Vaux to Dr. William Somerville, 27 March 1827, reprinted in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n. 1], 161–162.
- 4.
Mary Somerville, On the Mechanism of the Heavens (London, 1831), Dedication; and see the ‘Preliminary Dissertation’, vii, which prefaces the work (and which was to win for Mary a quite separate distinction as a statement of the intellectual power of science). See also Miss Joanna Baillie to Mary Somerville, 1 February 1832, in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n. 1], 206.
- 5.
Mary Somerville, On the Mechanism of the Heavens [n. 4], Preliminary Dissertation, xl.
- 6.
6.Mary Somerville, On the. Mechanism of the Heavens [n. 4], Preliminary Dissertation, xxvii. Also Physical Astronomy: ‘Introduction’ (which follows ‘Preliminary Dissertation’, pp. 1–3).
- 7.
John F.W. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 23 February 1830, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [329]. Also, Mary Somerville to Herschel, 15 May 1830, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [336].
- 8.
Dr. William Whewell to Dr. W. Somerville, 2 November 1831, reprinted in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n. 1], 170–171. Also Professor George Peacock to Mary Somerville, 14 February 1832: Personal Recollections, 172.
- 9.
Athenaeum 221 (1832), 43–4. The critical attacks on Mechanism are discussed by Mary Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science 1815–1840 (Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer Group, Boston, The Hague, Lancaster, 1983), 84–85. Mary Somerville’s own responses to Charles Buller’s and other slights were noted in her autobiographical draft but subsequently omitted from the published Personal Recollections. They are included in the new scholarly edition of her text, Queen of Science. Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, ed. Dorothy McMillan (Canongate Classics 102, Edinburgh, 2001), 145–146.
- 10.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 3rd edn. (London, 1836), 397. For the Caroline Herschel reference in On the Mechanism of the Heavens [n. 4], see ‘Preliminary Dissertation’, lxvi.
- 11.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences [n. 10], 412.
- 12.
In the ninth edition of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1858), Section XXIV, the Daguerrotype, calotype, chromatype and other photographic processes, along with the ‘chemical spectrum’, are discussed at length.
- 13.
I have not been able to locate a copy of the sixth edition of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1842), but the passage in which Mary Somerville referred to the possibility of using the orbital disturbances of known planets to discover the positions of unknown planets (cited in Personal Recollections [n. 1], 290), and which had first inspired Adams, appeared in previous editions: see On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 5th edn. (1840), 382. By the time of Connexion, 9th edn. (1858), the discovery of Neptune was discussed in some detail: 22, 62.
- 14.
Mary Somerville, Physical Geography 1, 2nd edn. (London, 1849), 44, footnote (for a list of names: Lyell, Murchison, etc.).
- 15.
F.L. Holmes, ‘Justus von Liebig’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 1981), 329–350; ‘Charles Daubeny’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography 585–586. Nigel I. Miller, ‘Chemistry for Gentlemen: Charles Daubeny and the Role of Chemical Education at Oxford’, Oxford University Chemistry Part II Thesis, 1986, deposited in the Oxford History Faculty Library: 1–13, 29–44, 66–80.
- 16.
Mary Somerville, Physical Geography vol. II [n. 13], Chapters XXIII ff. See, for example, Chapter XXX, 253, for her discussion on the greater prevalence of venomous snakes in the tropics.
- 17.
Mary Somerville, Physical Geography II [n. 14], 101–102.
- 18.
See Ref. [1].
- 19.
John EW. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 11 April 1865, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [372].
- 20.
Owen Gingerich, ‘Unlocking the Chemical Secrets of the Cosmos’, in Gingerich, The Great Copernicus Chase (Sky Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170–176.
- 21.
Mary Somerville, Microscopic and Molecular Science, vol. I (London, 1869), 167.
- 22.
Quarterly Review CIX, VII (December 1835), 195–233. Rather strangely, Mary Somerville’s name is nowhere associated with the article on Halley’s comet, which is listed as Section VII, in the Quarterly Review (December 1835), 195–333. Indeed, the articles printed in those pages are headed ‘1. Ueber den Halleyshen Cometen. Von Littrow. 2. Ueber den Halleyshen Cometen. Von Professor von Encke’. Nonetheless, in Personal Recollections [n. 1], 100, Mary Somerville mentions having been invited by John Murray to write an article on Halley’s comet for the Quarterly Review, while James Veitch, in his letter to Mary, seems to be referring to an article written by her which also appeared in the December 1835 Quarterly Review: James Veitch to Mary Somerville, 12 October 1836, Personal Recollections 101.
- 23.
James Veitch to Mary Somerville, 12 October 1836, in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n. 1], 101.
- 24.
Veitch, alas, had not been the first astronomer to sight the comet of 1811, as that honour went to a M. Flaugergues at Viviers in the Rhone valley in France, who saw it on 26 March 1811. Veitch had corresponded about it with Sir David Brewster, 5 August 1812: reprinted in The Home Life of Sir David Brewster, by his daughter Mrs Gordon (Margaret Maria) (Edinburgh, 1869), 78–79. For the discovery of the comet of 1811, see also J.R. Hind, The Comets. A Descriptive Treatise Upon these Bodies (London, 1852), 110. For Veitch, see A. Chapman, The Victorian Amateur Astronomer. Independent Astronomical Research in Britain 1820–1920 (Praxis-Wiley, Chichester and New York, 1998), 185–188.
- 25.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n. 1], 202.
Reference
Patterson, E. (1979). Mary Somerville 1780–1872 (p. 38). Oxford: Bocard & Church Army Press.
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Chapman, A. (2015). Mary Somerville: The Writer. In: Mary Somerville and the World of Science. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09399-4_4
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