nitude of the field opened to her, "I seemed to have resumed the perseverance and energy of my youth, and began to write with courage, though I did not think I should live to finish even the sketch I had made, and which I intended to publish under the name of 'Molecular and Microscopic Science,' and assumed as my motto, 'Deus magnus in magnis, maximus in minimis' ('God great in great things, greatest in the least'), from Saint Augustine."
This list of Mrs. Somerville's principal publications does not include all, nor even the most difficult of her works, for she produced, also, monographs on the "Analytical Attraction of Spheroids," "The Form and Rotation of the Earth," "The Tides of the Ocean and Atmosphere," "and, besides many others of equally abstruse nature, a treatise of two hundred and forty-six pages 'On Curves and Surfaces of the Higher Orders,' which she herself tells us she wrote con amore, to fill up her morning hours while spending her winter in Southern Italy."
With all these labors, and this concentration of her mind on the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics, Mrs. Somerville shone in the domestic circle, and enjoyed society and its amusements. "In reading the personal recollections of this wonderful woman," says "Nature," "nothing strikes one more than the ordinary and even commonplace conditions under which her great intellect advanced to maturity. In her case, the only exceptional features were her natural gifts, and her perseverance in cultivating them. Although 'the one woman of her time, and perhaps of all times,' so successfully did she conceal her learning under a delicate feminine exterior, a shy manner, and the practical qualities of an efficient mistress of a household, coupled with the graceful, artistic accomplishments of an elegant woman of the world, that ordinary visitors, who had sought her as a prodigy, came away disappointed that she looked and behaved like any other materfamilias, and talked just like other people." Mrs. Marcet wrote to her, announcing her election to a scientific society of Geneva: "You receive great honors, my dear friend, but that which you confer on our sex is still greater, for, with talents and acquirements of masculine magnitude, you unite the most sensitive and retiring modesty of the female sex; indeed, I know not any woman, perhaps I might say any human being, who would support so much applause without feeling the weakness of vanity." Miss Somerville says in the "Recollections": "It would be almost incredible were I to describe how much my mother contrived to do in the course of the day. When my sister and I were small children, although busily engaged in writing for the press, she used to teach us for three hours every morning, besides managing her house carefully, reading the newspapers (for she always was a keen and, I must add, a liberal politician), and the most important new books on all subjects, grave and gay. In addition to all this, she freely visited
