of her, asked permission to copy it, in order to
preserve a model of the best in Nature." And then we are told that
learned women can not be good-looking!...

The Marquise du Chatelet was no less renowned. She was predestined to
her career, if the following anecdote be credible. Gabrielle-Emilie de
Breteuil, born in 1706 (who, in 1725, was to marry the Marquis du
Chatelet, becoming, in 1733, the most celebrated friend of Voltaire),
was four or five years old when she was given an old compass, dressed up
as a doll, for a plaything. After examining this object for some time,
the child began angrily and impatiently to strip off the silly draperies
the toy was wrapped in, and after turning it over several times in her
little hands, she divined its uses, and traced a circle with it on a
sheet of paper. To her, among other things, we owe a precious, and
indeed the only French, translation of Newton's great work on universal
gravitation, the famous Principia, and she was, with Voltaire, an
eloquent propagator of the theory of attraction, rejected at that time
by the Academie des Sciences.

Numbers of other women astronomers might be cited, all showing how
accessible this highly abstract science is to the feminine intellect.
President des Brosses, in his charming Voyage en Italie, tells of the
visit he paid in Milan to the young Italian, Marie Agnesi, who delivered
harangues in Latin, and was acquainted with seven languages, and for
whom mathematics held no secrets. She was devoted to algebra and
geometry, which, she said, "are the only provinces of thought wherein
peace reigns." Madame de Charriere expressed herself in an aphorism of
the same order: "An hour or two of mathematics sets my mind at liberty,
and puts me in good spirits; I feel that I can eat and sleep better when
I have seen obvious and indisputable truths. This consoles me for the
obscurities of religion and metaphysics, or rather makes me forget them;
I am thankful there is something positive in this world." And did not
Madame de Blocqueville, last surviving daughter of Marshal Davout, who
died in 1892, exclaim in her turn: "Astronomy, science of sciences! by
which I am attracted, and terrified, and which I adore! By it my soul is
detached from the things of this world, for it draws me to those unknown
spheres that evoked from Newton the triumphant cry: '_Coeli enarrant
gloriam Dei!_'"

Nor must we omit Miss Caroline Herschel, sister of the greatest observer