Woman in Science: With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the MindZahm, J. A. (John Augustine)
HistoryChristian
Woman in Science: With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind
Zahm, J. A. (John Augustine)
Women -- History; Women scientists
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
Aimee'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 preeminent. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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