"Lady Hamilton," writes Professor Veitch in his _Memoir of Sir William Hamilton,_ "had a power of keeping her husband up to what he had to do. She contended wisely against a sort of energetic indolence which characterized him, and which, while he was always laboring, made him apt to put aside the task actually before him, sometimes diverted by subjects of inquiry suggested in the course of study on the matter in hand, sometimes discouraged by the difficulty of reducing to order the immense mass of materials he had accumulated in connection with it. Then her resolution and cheerful disposition sustained and refreshed him, and never more so than when, during the last twelve years of his life, his bodily strength was broken and his spirit, though languid, yet ceased not from mental toil. The truth is that Sir William's marriage, his comparatively limited circumstances, and the character of his wife supplied to a nature that would have been contented to spend its mighty energies in work that brought no reward but in the doing of it, and that might never have been made publicly known or available, the practical force and impulse which enabled him to accomplish what he actually did in literature and philosophy. It was this influence, without doubt, which saved him from utter absorption in his world of rare, noble and elevated but ever-increasingly unattainable ideas. But for it the serene sea of abstract thought might have held him becalmed for life; and, in the absence of all utterance of definite knowledge of his conclusions, the world might have been left to an ignorant and mysterious wonder about the unprofitable scholar."[251] What has been so far said, important as it is, does not tell the whole story of woman's influence on men of science, and consequently on the progress of science. We should not have an adequate conception of women as inspirers and collaborators if we did not advert to certain faculties which they usually possess in a more eminent degree than the most of men. It is a well-known fact that in many of the affairs of life women are more practical, have more tact, and possess keener and quicker perceptions than men. They are, too, more ideal, more romantic and more enthusiastic. Men of science in their investigations usually proceed by the slow and laborious process of collecting facts and collating phenomena, either by observation or experiment, or both, and, from the observed facts and phenomena, they formulate a law which explains and correlates them. This is known as induction, a method which proceeds from facts to ideas.