Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals Part 20

"When you aid a teacher, you improve the education of your children. It is a wonder that teachers work as well as they do. I never look at a group of them without using, mentally, the expression, 'The n.o.ble army of martyrs'!

"The chemist should have had a laboratory, and the observatory should have had an astronomer; but we are too apt to bestow money where there is no man, and to find a man where there is no money.

"If every girl who is aided were a very high order of scholar, scholarship would undoubtedly conquer poverty; but a large part of the aided students are ordinary. They lack, at least, executive power, as their ancestors probably did. Poverty is a misfortune; misfortunes are often the result of blamable indiscretion, extravagance, etc.

"It is one of the many blessings of poverty that one is not obliged to 'give wisely.'"

1866. _To her students:_ "I cannot expect to make astronomers, but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking.... When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.

"... But star-gazing is not science. The entrance to astronomy is through mathematics. You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work. You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly....

"The phrase 'popular science' has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

"The laws which govern the motions of the sun, the earth, planets, and other bodies in the universe, cannot be understood and demonstrated without a solid basis of mathematical learning.

"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to G.o.d.

"You cannot study anything persistently for years without becoming learned, and although I would not hold reputation up to you as a very high object of ambition, it is a wayside flower which you are sure to have catch at your skirts.

"Whatever apology other women may have for loose, ill-finished work, or work not finished at all, you will have none.

"When you leave Va.s.sar College, you leave it the _best educated women in the world_. Living a little outside of the college, beyond the reach of the little currents that go up and down the corridors, I think I am a fairer judge of your advantages than you can be yourselves; and when I say you will be the best educated women in the world, I do not mean the education of text-books, and cla.s.s-rooms, and apparatus, only, but that broader education which you receive unconsciously, that higher teaching which comes to you, all unknown to the givers, from daily a.s.sociation with the n.o.ble-souled women who are around you."

"1871. When astronomers compare observations made by different persons, they cannot neglect the const.i.tutional peculiarities of the individuals, and there enters into these computations a quant.i.ty called 'personal equation.' In common terms, it is that difference between two individuals from which results a difference in the _time_ which they require to receive and note an occurrence. If one sees a star at one instant, and records it, the record of another, of the same thing, is not the same.

"It is true, also, that the same individual is not the same at all times; so that between two individuals there is a mean or middle individual, and each individual has a mean or middle self, which is not the man of to-day, nor the man of yesterday, nor the man of to-morrow; but a middle man among these different selves....

"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

"There will come with the greater love of science greater love to one another. Living more nearly to Nature is living farther from the world and from its follies, but nearer to the world's people; it is to be of them, with them, and for them, and especially for their improvement. We cannot see how impartially Nature gives of her riches to all, without loving all, and helping all; and if we cannot learn through Nature's laws the certainty of spiritual truths, we can at least learn to promote spiritual growth while we are together, and live in a trusting hope of a greater growth in the future.

"... The great gain would be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.

[1874.] "I am but a woman!

"For women there are, undoubtedly, great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome. First, no woman should say, 'I am but a woman!' But a woman! What more can you ask to be?

"Born a woman--born with the average brain of humanity--born with more than the average heart--if you are mortal, what higher destiny could you have? No matter where you are nor what you are, you are a power--your influence is incalculable; personal influence is always underrated by the person. We are all centres of spheres--we see the portions of the sphere above us, and we see how little we affect it. We forget the part of the sphere around and before us--it extends just as far every way.

"Another common saying, 'It isn't the way,' etc. Who settles the way? Is there any one so forgetful of the sovereignty bestowed on her by G.o.d that she accepts a leader--one who shall capture her mind?

"There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages?

"We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.

"'The world is round, and like a ball Seems swinging in the air.'[1]

[Footnote 1: From Peter Parley's Primary Geography.]

"No such thing! the world is not round, it does not swing, and it doesn't _seem_ to swing!

"I know I shall be called heterodox, and that unseen lightning flashes and unheard thunderbolts will be playing around my head, when I say that women will never be profound students in any other department except music while they give four hours a day to the _practice_ of music. I should by all means encourage every woman who is born with musical gifts to study music; but study it as a science and an art, and not as an accomplishment; and to every woman who is not musical, I should say, 'Don't study it at all;' you cannot afford four hours a day, out of some years of your life, just to be agreeable in company upon _possible_ occasions.

"If for four hours a day you studied, year after year, the science of language, for instance, do you suppose you would not be a linguist? Do you put the mere pleasing of some social party, and the reception of a few compliments, against the mental development of four hours a day of study of something for which you were born?

"When I see that girls who are required by their parents to go through with the irksome practising really become respectable performers, I wonder what four hours a day at something which they loved, and for which G.o.d designed them, would do for them.

"I should think that to a real scientist in music there would be something mortifying in this rush of all women into music; as there would be to me if I saw every girl learning the constellations, and then thinking she was an astronomer!

"Jan. 8, 1876. At the meeting of graduates at the Deacon House, the speeches that were made were mainly those of Dr. R. and Professor B. I am sorry now that I did not at least say that the college is what it is mainly because the early students pushed up the course to a collegiate standard.

"Jan. 25, 1876. It has become a serious question with me whether it is not my duty to beg money for the observatory, while what I really long for is a quiet life of scientific speculation. I want to sit down and study on the observations made by myself and others."

During her later years at Va.s.sar, Miss Mitch.e.l.l interested herself personally in raising a fund to endow the chair of astronomy. In March, 1886, she wrote: "I have been in New York quite lately, and am quite hopeful that Miss ---- will do something for Va.s.sar. Mrs. C., of Newburyport, is to ask Whittier, who is said to be rich, and ---- told me to get anything I could out of her father. But after all I am a poor beggar; my ideas are small!"

Since Miss Mitch.e.l.l's death, the fund has been completed by the alumnae, and is known as the Maria Mitch.e.l.l Endowment Fund. With $10,000 appropriated by the trustees it amounts to $50,000.

"June 18, 1876. I had imagined the Emperor of Brazil to be a dark, swarthy, tall man, of forty-five years; that he would not really have a crown upon his head, but that I should feel it was somewhere around, handy-like, and that I should know I was in royal presence. But he turns out to be a large, old man,--say, sixty-five,--broad-headed and broad-shouldered, with a big white beard, and a very pleasant, even chatty, manner.

"Once inside of the dome, he seemed to feel at home; to my astonishment he asked if Alvan Clark made the gla.s.s of the equatorial. As he stepped into the meridian-room, and saw the instruments, he said, 'Collimators?'

I said, 'You have been in observatories before.' 'Oh, yes, Cambridge and Washington,' he replied. He seemed much more interested in the observatory than I could possibly expect. I asked him to go on top of the roof, and he said he had not time; yet he stayed long enough to go up several times. I am told that he follows out, remarkably, his own ideas as to his movements."

In 1878, Miss Mitch.e.l.l went to Denver, Colorado, to observe the total eclipse of the sun. She was accompanied by several of her former pupils.

She prepared an account of this eclipse, which will be found in Chapter XI.

"Aug. 20, 1878. Dr. Raymond [President of Va.s.sar College] is dead. I cannot quite take it in. I have never known the college without him, and it will make all things different.

"Personally, I have always been fond of him; he was very enjoyable socially and intellectually. Officially he was, in his relations to the students, perfect. He was cautious to a fault, and has probably been very wise in his administration of college affairs. He was broad in his religious views. He was not broad in his ideas of women, and was made to broaden the education of women by the women around him.

"June 18, 1881. The dome party to-day was sixty-two in number. It was breakfast, and we opened the dome; we seated forty in the dome and twenty in the meridian-room."

This "dome party" requires a few words of explanation, because it was unique among all the Va.s.sar festivities. The week before commencement, Miss Mitch.e.l.l's pupils would be informed of the approaching gathering by a notice like the following:

CIRCULAR.

The annual dome party will be held at the observatory on Sat.u.r.day, the 19th, at 6 P.M. You are cordially invited to be present.

M. M.

[As this gathering is highly intellectual, you are invited to bring poems.]