Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville Part 6

LETTER FROM M. DE CANDOLLE TO MRS. SOMERVILLE.

LONDRES, _5 Juin, 1819_.

MADAME,

Vous avez pa.s.se les premieres difficultes de l'etude des plantes et vous me faites l'honneur de me consulter sur les moyens d'aller en avant; connaissant votre gout et votre talent pour les sciences les plus relevees je ne craindrai point de vous engager a sortir de la Botanique elementaire et a vous elever aux considerations et aux etudes qui en font une science susceptible d'idees generales, d'applications aux choses utiles et de liaison avec les autres branches des connaissances humaines. Pour cela il faut etudier non plus seulement la nomenclature et l'echafaudage artificiel qui la soutient, mais les rapports des plantes entre elles et avec les elemens exterieurs, ou en d'autres termes, la cla.s.sification naturelle et la Physiologie.

Pour l'un et l'autre de ces branches de la science il est necessaire en premier lieu de se familiariser avec la structure des plantes consideree dans leur caractere exacte. Vous trouverez un precis abrege de ces caracteres dans le 1^er vol. de la Flore francaise; vous la trouverez plus developpe et accompagne de planches dans les Elemens de Botanique de Michel. Quant a la structure du fruit qui est un des points les plus difficiles et les plus importans, vous allez avoir un bon ouvrage traduit et augmente par un de vos jeunes et habiles compatriotes, Mr. Lindley--c'est l'a.n.a.lyse du fruit de M.

Richard. La traduction vaudra mieux que l'original. Outre ces lectures, ce qui vous apprendra surtout la structure des plantes, c'est de les a.n.a.lyser et de les decrire vous-meme d'apres les termes techniques; ce travail deviendrait penible et inutile a faire sur un grand nombre de plantes, et il vaut mieux ne le faire que sur un tres pet.i.t nombre d'especes choisies dans des cla.s.ses tres distinctes. Quelques descriptions faites aussi completes qu'il vous sera possible vous apprendra plus que tous les livres.

Des que vous connaitrez bien les organes et concurremment avec cette etude vous devrez chercher a prendre une idee de la cla.s.sification naturelle. Je crains de vous paraitre presomptueux en vous engageant a lire d'abord sous ce point de vue ma Theorie elementaire. Apres ces etudes ou a peu pres en meme temps pour profiter de la saison, vous ferez bien de rapporter aux ordres naturels toutes les plantes que vous aurez recueillies. La lecture des caracteres des familles faites la plante a la main et l'acte de ranger vos plantes en familles vous feront connaitre par theorie et par pratique ces groupes naturels. Je vous engage dans cette etude, surtout en le commencement, a ne donner que peu d'attention au systeme general qui lie les familles, mais beaucoup a la connaissance de la physionomie qui est propre a chacune d'elles. Sous ce point de vue vous pourrez trouver quelque interet a lire--1 les Tableaux de la Nature de M.

de Humboldt; 2 mon essai sur les proprietes des plantes comparees avec leurs formes exterieures; 3 les remarques sur la geographie botanique de la Nouvelle Hollande et de l'Afrique, inseres par M.

Robt. Brown a la fin du voyage de Finders et de l'expedition au Congo.

Quant a l'etude de la Physiologie ou de la connaissance des vegetaux consideres comme etres vivans, je vous engage a lire les ouvrages dans l'ordre suivant: Philibert, Elemens de Bot. et de Phys., 3 vols.; la 2^de partie des principes elementaires de la Bot.

de la Flore francaise. Vous trouverez la partie anatomique dans l'ouvrage de Mirbel; la partie chimique dans les recherches chimiques sur la Veget. de T. de Saussure; la partie statique dans la statique des vegetaux de Hales, &c. &c. Mais je vous engage surtout a voir par vous-meme les plantes a tous leurs ages, a suivre leur vegetation, a les decrire en detail, en un mot a vivre avec elles plus qu'avec les livres.

Je desire, madame, que ces conseils puissent vous engager a suivre l'etude des plantes sous cette direction qui je crois en releve beaucoup l'importance et l'interet. Je m'estimerai heureux si en vous l'indiquant je puis concourir a vos succes futures et a vous initier dans une etude que j'ai toujours regarde comme une de celles qui peut le plus contribuer au bonheur journalier.

Je vous prie d'agreer mes hommages empresses.

DE CANDOLLE.

We had made the ordinary short tour through Switzerland, and had arrived at Lausanne on our way home, when I was taken ill with a severe fever which detained us there for many weeks. I shall never forget the kindness I received from two Miss Barclays, Quaker ladies, and a Miss Fotheringham, who, on hearing of my illness, came and sat up alternate nights with me, as if I had been their sister.

The winter was now fast approaching, and Somerville thought that in my weak state a warm climate was necessary; so we arranged with our friends, the Miss Barclays, to pa.s.s the Simplon together. We parted company at Milan, but we renewed our friendship in London.

We went to Monza, and saw the iron crown; and there I found the Magnolia grandiflora, which hitherto I had only known as a greenhouse plant, rising almost into a forest tree.

At Venice we renewed our acquaintance with the Countess Albrizzi, who received every evening. It was at these receptions that we saw Lord Byron, but he would not make the acquaintance of any English people at that time. When he came into the room I did not perceive his lameness, and thought him strikingly like my brother Henry, who was remarkably handsome. I said to Somerville, "Is Lord Byron like anyone you know?"

"Your brother Henry, decidedly." Lord Broughton, then Sir John Cam Hobhouse, was also present.

At Florence, I was presented to the Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward Stuart the Pretender. She was then supposed to be married to Alfieri the poet, and had a kind of state reception every evening. I did not like her, and never went again. Her manner was proud and insolent. "So you don't speak Italian; you must have had a very bad education, for Miss Clephane Maclane there [who was close by] speaks both French and Italian perfectly." So saying, she turned away, and never addressed another word to me. That evening I recognised in Countess Moretti my old friend Agnes Bonar. Moretti was of good family; but, having been banished from home for political opinions, he taught the guitar in London for bread, and an attachment was formed between him and his pupil. After the murder of her parents, they were both persecuted with the most unrelenting cruelty by her brother. They escaped to Milan where they were married.

I was still a young woman; but I thought myself too old to learn to speak a foreign language, consequently I did not try. I spoke French badly; and now, after several years' residence in Italy, although I can carry on a conversation fluently in Italian, I do not speak it well.

[When my mother first went abroad, she had no fluency in talking French, although she was well acquainted with the literature. To show how, at every period of her life, she missed no opportunity of acquiring information or improvement, I may mention that many years after, when we were spending a summer in Siena, where the language is spoken with great purity and elegance, she engaged a lady to converse in Italian with her for a couple of hours daily. By this means she very soon became perfectly familiar with the language, and could keep up conversation in Italian without difficulty. She never cared to write in any language but English. Her style has been reckoned particularly clear and good, and she was complimented on it by various competent judges, although she herself was always diffident about her writings, saying she was only a self-taught, uneducated Scotchwoman, and feared to use Scotch idioms inadvertently. In speaking she had a very decided but pleasant Scotch accent, and when aroused and excited, would often unconsciously use not only native idioms, but quaint old Scotch words. Her voice was soft and low, and her manner earnest.]

On our way to Rome, where we spent the winter of 1817, it was startling to see the fine church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, below a.s.sisi, cut in two; half of the church and half of the dome above it were still entire; the rest had been thrown down by the earthquake which had destroyed the neighbouring town of Foligno, and committed such ravages in this part of Umbria.

At that time I might have been pardoned if I had described St Peter's, the Vatican, and the innumerable treasures of art and antiquity at Rome; but now that they are so well known it would be ridiculous and superfluous. Here I gained a little more knowledge about pictures; but I preferred sculpture, partly from the n.o.ble specimens of Greek art I saw in Paris and Rome, and partly because I was such an enthusiast about the language and everything belonging to ancient Greece. During this journey I was highly gratified, for we made the acquaintance of Thorwaldsen and Canova. Canova was gentle and amiable, with a beautiful countenance, and was an artist of great reputation. Thorwaldsen had a n.o.ble and striking appearance, and had more power and originality than Canova. His bas-reliefs were greatly admired. I saw the one he made of Night in the house of an English lady, who had a talent for modelling, and was said to be attached to him. We were presented to Pope Pius the Seventh; a handsome, gentlemanly, and amiable old man. He received us in a summer-house in the garden of the Vatican. He was sitting on a sofa, and made me sit beside him. His manners were simple and very gracious; he spoke freely of what he had suffered in France. He said, "G.o.d forbid that he should bear ill-will to any one; but the journey and the cold were trying to an old man, and he was glad to return to a warm climate and to his own country." When we took leave, he said to me, "Though a Protestant, you will be none the worse for an old man's blessing." Pius the Seventh was loved and respected; the people knelt to him as he pa.s.sed. Many years afterwards we were presented to Gregory the Sixteenth, a very common-looking man, forming a great contrast to Pius the Seventh.

I heard more good music during this first visit to Rome than I ever did after; for besides that usual in St. Peter's, there was an Academia every week, where Marcello's Psalms were sung in concert by a number of male voices, besides other concerts, private and public. We did not make the acquaintance of any of the Roman families at this time; but we saw Pauline Borghese, sister of the Emperor Napoleon, so celebrated for her beauty, walking on the Pincio every afternoon. Our great geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, with his wife, were among the English residents at Rome. At that time he hardly knew one stone from another. He had been an officer in the Dragoons, an excellent horseman, and a keen fox-hunter.

Lady Murchison,--an amiable and accomplished woman, with solid acquirements which few ladies at that time possessed--had taken to the study of geology; and soon after her husband began that career which has rendered him the first geologist of our country. It was then that a friendship began between them and us, which will only end with life.

Mrs. Fairfax, of Gilling Castle, and her two handsome daughters were also at Rome. She was my namesake--Mary Fairfax--and my valued friend till her death. Now, alas! many of these friends are gone.

There were such troops of brigands in the Papal States, that it was considered unsafe to go outside the gates of Rome. They carried off people to the mountains, and kept them till ransomed; sometimes even mutilated them, as they do at the present day in the kingdom of Naples.

Lucien Bonaparte made a narrow escape from being carried off from his villa, Villa Ruffinella, near Frascati. When it could be proved that brigands had committed murder, they were confined in prisons in the Maremma, at Campo Morto, where fever prevails, and where they were supposed to die of malaria. I saw Gasperone, the chief of a famous band, in a prison at Civita Vecchia; he was said to be a relative of Cardinal Antonelli, both coming from the brigand village of Sonnino, in the Volscian mountains. In going to Naples our friends advised us to take a guard of soldiers; but these were suspected of being as bad, and in league with the brigands. So we travelled post without them; and though I foolishly insisted on going round by the ruins of ancient Capua, which was considered very unsafe, we arrived at Naples without any encounter.

Here we met with the son and daughter of Mr. Smith, of Norwich, a celebrated leader in the anti-slavery question. This was a bond of interest between his family and me; for when I was a girl I took the anti-slavery cause so warmly to heart that I would not take sugar in my tea, or indeed taste anything with sugar in it. I was not singular in this, for my cousins and many of my acquaintances came to the same resolution. How long we kept it I do not remember. Patty Smith and I became great friends, and I knew her sisters; but only remember her niece Florence Nightingale as a very little child. My friend Patty was liberal in her opinions, witty, original, an excellent horsewoman, and drew cleverly; but from bad health she was peculiar in all her habits.

She was a good judge of art. Her father had a valuable collection of pictures of the ancient masters; and I learnt much from her with regard to paintings and style in drawing. We went to see everything in Naples and its environs together, and she accompanied Somerville and me in an expedition to Paestum, where we made sketches of the temples. At Naples we bought a beautiful cork model of the Temple of Neptune, which was placed on our mineral cabinet on our return to London. A lady who came to pay me a morning visit asked Somerville what it was; and when he told her, she said, "How dreadful it is to think that all the people who worshipped in that temple are in eternal misery, because they did not believe in our Saviour." Somerville asked, "How could they believe in Christ when He was not born till many centuries after?" I am sure she thought it was all the same.

There had been an eruption of Vesuvius just before our arrival at Naples, and it was still smoking very much; however, we ascended it, and walked round the crater, running and holding a handkerchief to our nose an we pa.s.sed through the smoke, when the wind blew it to our side. The crater was just like an empty funnel, wide at the mouth, and narrowing to a throat. The lava was hard enough to bear us; but there were numerous _fumeroles_ or red-hot chasms, in it, which we could look into.

Somerville bought a number of crystals from the guides, and went repeatedly to Portici afterwards to complete our collection of volcanic minerals.

They were excavating busily at Pompeii; at that time, and in one of our many excursions there Somerville bought from one of the workmen a bronze statuette of Minerva, and a very fine rosso antico Terminus, which we contrived to smuggle into Naples; and it now forms part of a small but excellent collection of antiques which I still possess. The excavations at that period were conducted with little regularity or direction, and the guides were able to carry on a contraband trade as mentioned. Since the annexation of the Neapolitan provinces to the kingdom of Italy, the Cavaliere Fiorelli has organized the system of excavations in the most masterly manner, and has made many interesting discoveries. About one-third of the town has been excavated since it was discovered till the present day.

In pa.s.sing through Bologna, we became acquainted with the celebrated Mezzofanti, afterwards Cardinal. He was a quiet-looking priest; we could not see anything in his countenance that indicated talent, nor was his conversation remarkable; yet he told us that he understood fifty-two languages. He left no memoir at his death; nor did he ever trace any connection between these languages; it was merely an astonishing power, which led to nothing, like that of a young American I lately heard of, who could play eleven games at chess at the same time, without looking at any chess-board.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Joseph Barclay Pentland, Consul-General in Bolivia (1836-39), died in London, July, 1873. He first discovered that Illimani and Sorata (not Chimborazo) were the highest mountains in America. (See Humboldt's "Kosmos.")]

CHAPTER VIII.

EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS--DR. WOLLASTON--DR. YOUNG--THE HERSCHELS.

When we returned to Hanover Square, I devoted my morning hours, as usual, to domestic affairs; but now my children occupied a good deal of my time. Although still very young, I thought it advisable for them to acquire foreign languages; so I engaged a French nursery-maid, that they might never suffer what I had done from ignorance of modern languages. I besides gave them instruction in such things as I was capable of teaching, and which were suited to their age.

It was a great amus.e.m.e.nt to Somerville and myself to arrange the minerals we had collected during our journey. Our cabinet was now very rich. Some of our specimens we had bought; our friends had given us duplicates of those they possessed; and George Finlayson, who was with our troops in Ceylon, and who had devoted all his spare time to the study of the natural productions of the country, sent us a valuable collection of crystals of sapphire, ruby, oriental topaz, amethyst, &c., &c. Somerville used to a.n.a.lyze minerals with the blowpipe, which I never did. One evening, when he was so occupied, I was playing the piano, when suddenly I fainted; he was very much startled, as neither I nor any of our family had ever done such a thing. When I recovered, I said it was the smell of garlic that had made me ill. The truth was, the mineral contained a.r.s.enic, and I was poisoned for the time by the fumes.

At this time we formed an acquaintance with Dr. Wollaston, which soon became a lasting friendship. He was gentlemanly, a cheerful companion, and a philosopher; he was also of agreeable appearance, having a remarkably fine, intellectual head. He was essentially a chemist, and discovered palladium; but there were few branches of science with which he was not more or less acquainted. He made experiments to discover imponderable matter; I believe, with regard to the ethereal medium. Mr.

Brand, of the Royal Inst.i.tution, enraged him by sending so strong a current of electricity through a machine he had made to prove electro-magnetic rotation, as to destroy it. His characteristic was extreme accuracy, which particularly fitted him for giving that precision to the science of crystallography which it had not hitherto attained. By the invention of the goniometer which bears his name, he was enabled to measure the angle formed by the faces of a crystal by means of the reflected images of bright objects seen in them. We bought a goniometer, and Dr. Wollaston, who often dined with us, taught Somerville and me how to use it, by measuring the angles of many of our crystals during the evening. I learnt a great deal on a variety of subjects besides crystallography from Dr. Wollaston, who, at his death, left me a collection of models of the forms of all the natural crystals then known.

Though still occasionally occupied with the mineral productions of the earth, I became far more interested in the formation of the earth itself. Geologists had excited public attention, and had shocked the clergy and the more scrupulous of the laity by proving beyond a doubt that the formation of the globe extended through enormous periods of time. The contest was even more keen then than it is at the present time about the various races of prehistoric men. It lasted very long, too; for after I had published my work on Physical Geography, I was preached against by name in York Cathedral. Our friend, Dr. Buckland, committed himself by taking the clerical view in his "Bridgewater Treatise;" but facts are such stubborn things that he was obliged to join the geologists at last. He and Mrs. Buckland invited Somerville and me to spend a week with them in Christchurch College, Oxford. Mr. and Mrs.

Murchison were their guests at the same time. Mr. Murchison (now Sir Roderick) was then rising rapidly to the pre-eminence he now holds as a geologist. We spent every day in seeing some of the numerous objects of interest in that celebrated university, venerable for its antiquity, historical records, and n.o.ble architecture.

Somerville and I used frequently to spend the evening with Captain and Mrs. Kater. Dr. Wollaston, Dr. Young, and others were generally of the party; sometimes we had music, for Captain and Mrs. Kater sang very prettily. All kinds of scientific subjects were discussed, experiments tried and astronomical observations made in a little garden in front of the house. One evening we had been trying the power of a telescope in separating double stars till about two in the morning; on our way home we saw a light in Dr. Young's window, and when Somerville rang the bell, down came the doctor himself in his dressing-gown, and said, "Come in; I have something curious to show you." Astronomical signs are frequently found on ancient Egyptian monuments, and were supposed to have been employed by the priests to record dates. Now Dr. Young had received a papyrus from Egypt, sent to him by Mr. Salt, who had found it in a mummy-case; and that very evening he had proved it to be a horoscope of the age of the Ptolemies, and had determined the date from the configuration of the heavens at the time of its construction. Dr. Young had already made himself famous by the interpretation of hieroglyphic characters on a stone which had been brought to the British Museum from Rosetta in Egypt. On that stone there is an inscription in Hieroglyphics, the sacred symbolic language of the early Egyptians; another in the Enchorial or spoken language of that most ancient people, and a mutilated inscription in Greek. By the aid of some fragments of papyri Dr. Young discovered that the Enchorial language is alphabetical, and that nine of its letters correspond with ours; moreover, he discovered such a relation between the Enchorial and the hieroglyphic inscription that he interpreted the latter and published his discoveries in the years 1815 and 1816.

M. Champollion, who had been on the same pursuit, examined the fine collection of papyri in the museum at Turin, and afterwards went to Egypt to pursue his studies on hieroglyphics, to our knowledge of which he contributed greatly. It is to be regretted that one who had brought that branch of science to such perfection should have been so ungenerous as to ignore the a.s.sistance he had received from the researches of Dr. Young. When the Royal Inst.i.tution was first established, Dr. Young lectured on natural philosophy. He proved the undulatory theory of light by direct experiment, but as it depended upon the hypothesis of an ethereal medium, it was not received in England, the more so as it was contrary to Newton's theory. The French _savants_ afterwards did Young ample justice. The existence of the ethereal medium is now all but proved, since part of the corona surrounding the moon during a total solar eclipse is polarized--a phenomenon depending on matter. Young's Lectures, which had been published, were a mine of riches to me. He was of a Quaker family; but although he left the Society of Friends at an early age, he retained their formal precision of manner to the last. He was of a kindly disposition, and his wife and her sisters, with whom I was intimate, were much attached to him. Dr.

Young was an elegant and critical scholar at a very early age; he was an astronomer, a mathematician, and there were few branches of science in which he was not versed. When young, his Quaker habits did not prevent him from taking lessons in music and dancing. I have heard him accompany his sister-in-law with the flute, while she played the piano. When not more than sixteen years of age he was so remarkable for steadiness and acquirements that he was engaged more as a companion than tutor to young Hudson Gurney, who was nearly of his own age. One spring morning Young came to breakfast in a bright green coat, and said in explanation of his somewhat eccentric costume for one who had been a Quaker, that it was suitable to the season. One day, on returning from their ride Gurney, leaped his horse over the stable-yard gate. Young, trying to do the same, was thrown; he got up, mounted, and made a second attempt with no better success; the third time he kept his seat, then quietly dismounting, he said, "What one man can do, another may."

One bright morning Dr. Wollaston came to pay us a visit in Hanover Square, saying, "I have discovered seven dark lines crossing the solar spectrum, which I wish to show you;" then, closing the window-shutters so as to leave only a narrow line of light, he put a small gla.s.s prism into my hand, telling me how to hold it. I saw them distinctly. I was among the first, if not the very first, to whom he showed these lines, which were the origin of the most wonderful series of cosmical discoveries, and have proved that many of the substances of our globe are also const.i.tuents of the sun, the stars, and even of the nebulae.

Dr. Wollaston gave me the little prism, which is doubly valuable, being of gla.s.s manufactured at Munich by Fraunhofer, whose table of dark lines has now become the standard of comparison in that marvellous science, the work of many ill.u.s.trious men, brought to perfection by Bunsen and Kirchhoff.