Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals - Maria Mitchell
"The energy of the American girl! The rich inheritance which has come
down to her from men and women who sought, in the New World, a better
and higher life.
"When the American girl carries her energy into the great questions of
humanity, into the practical problems of life; when she takes home to
her heart the interests of education, of government, and of religion,
what may we not hope for our country!
London, 1873. "It was the 26th of August, and I had no hope that Miss
Cobbe could be at her town residence, but I felt bound to deliver Mrs.
Howe's letter, and I wished to give her a Vassar pamphlet; so I took a
cab and drove; it was at an enormous distance from my lodging--she told
me it was six miles. I was as much surprised as delighted when the girl
said she was at home, for the house had painters in it, the carpets were
up, and everything looked uninhabitable. The girl came back, after
taking my card, and asked me if I would go into the studio, and so took
me through a pretty garden into a small building of two rooms, the outer
one filled with pictures and books. I had never heard that Miss Cobbe
was an artist, and so I looked around, and was afraid that I had got the
wrong Miss Cobbe. But as I glanced at the table I saw the 'Contemporary
Review,' and I took up the first article and read it--by Herbert
Spencer. I had become somewhat interested in a pretty severe criticism
of the modes of reasoning of mathematical men, and had perceived that he
said the problems of concrete sciences were harder than any of the
physical sciences (which I admitted was all true), when a very white dog
came bounding in upon me, and I dropped the book, knowing that the dog's
mistress must be coming,--and Miss Cobbe entered. She looked just as I
expected, but even larger; but then her head is magnificent because so
large. She was very cordial at once, and told me that Miss Davies had
told her I was in London. She said the studio was that of her friend. I
could not refrain from thanking her for her books, and telling her how
much we valued them in America, and how much good I believed they had
done. She colored a very little, and said, 'Nothing could be more
gratifying to me.'
"I had heard that she was not a women's rights woman, and she said, 'Who
could have told you that? I am remarkably so. I write suffrage articles
continually--I sign petitions.'
"I was delighted to find that she had been an intimate friend of Mrs.
Somerville; had corresponded with her for years, and had a letter from
her after she was ninety-two years of age, when she was reading
Quaternions for amusement. She said that Mrs. Somerville would probably
have called herself a Unitarian, but that really she was a Theist, and
that it came out more in her later life. She said she was correcting
proof of the Life by the daughters; that the Life was intensely
interesting; that Mrs. Somerville mourned all her life that she had not
had the advantages of education.
"I asked her how I could get a photograph of Mrs. Somerville, and she
said they could not be bought. She told me, without any hint from me,
that she would give Vassar College a plaster cast of the bust of Mrs.
Somerville. [Footnote: This bust always stood in Miss Mitchell's parlor
at the observatory.] She said, as women grew older, if they lived
independent lives, they were pretty sure to be 'women's rights women.'
She said the clergy--the broadest, who were in harmony with her--were
very courteous, and that since she had grown old (she's about
forty-five) all men were more tolerant of her and forgot the difference
of sex.
"I felt drawn to her when she was most serious. I told her I had
suffered much from doubt, and asked her if she had; and she said yes,
when she was young; but that she had had, in her life, rare intervals
when she believed she held communion with God, and on those rare periods
she had rested in the long intermissions. She laughed, and the tears
came to her eyes, all together; she was _quick_, and all-alive, and so
courteous. When she gave me a book she said, 'May I write your whole
name? and may I say "from your friend"?'
"Then she hurried on her bonnet, and walked to the station with me; and
her round face, with the blond hair and the light-blue eyes, seemed to
me to become beautiful as she talked.
"In Edinburgh I asked for a photograph of Mary Somerville, and the young
man behind the counter replied, 'I don't know who it is.'
"In London I asked at a bookstore, which the Murrays recommended, for a
photograph of Mrs. Somerville and of Sir George Airy, and the man said
if they could be had in London he would get them; and then he asked,
'Are they English?' and I informed him that Sir George Airy was the
astronomer royal!
* * * * *
"'The Glasgow College for Girls.' Seeing a sign of this sort, I rang the
door-bell of the house to which it was attached, entered, and was told
the lady was at home. As I waited for her, I took up the 'Prospectus,'
and it was enough,--'music, dancing, drawing, needlework, and English'
were the prominent features, and the pupils were children. All well
enough,--but why call it a college?
"When the lady superintendent came in, I told her that I had supposed it
was for more advanced students, and she said, 'Oh, it is for girls up to
twenty; one supposes a girl is finished by twenty.'
"I asked, as modestly as I could, 'Have you any pupils in Latin and
mathematics?' and she said, 'No, it's for girls, you know. Dr. M. hopes
we shall have some mathematics next year.' 'And,' I asked, 'some Latin?'
'Yes, Dr. M. hopes we shall have some Latin; but I confess I believe
Latin and mathematics all bosh; give them modern languages and
accomplishments. I suppose your school is for professional women.'
"I told her no; that the daughters of our wealthiest people demand
learning; that it would scarcely be considered 'good society' when the
women had neither Latin nor mathematics.
"'Oh, well,' she said, 'they get married here so soon.'
"When I asked her if they had lady teachers, she said 'Oh, no [as if
that would ruin the institution]; nothing but first-class masters.'
"It was clear that the women taught the needlework."
CHAPTER XI
PAPERS--SCIENCE [1874]--THE DENVER ECLIPSE [1878]--COLORS OF STARS
"The dissemination of information in regard to science and to scientific
investigations relieves the scientist from the small annoyances of
extreme ignorance.
"No one to-day will expect to receive a letter such as reached Sir John
Herschel some years ago, asking for the writer's horoscope to be cast;
or such as he received at another time, which asked, Shall I marry? and
Have I seen _her_?
"Nor can it be long, if the whole population is somewhat educated, that
I shall be likely to receive, as I have done, applications for
information as to the recovery of stolen goods, or to tell fortunes.
"When crossing the Atlantic, an Irish woman came to me and asked me if I
told fortunes; and when I replied in the negative, she asked me if I
were not an astronomer. I admitted that I made efforts in that
direction. She then asked me what I could tell, if not fortunes. I told
her that I could tell when the moon would rise, when the sun would rise,
etc. She said, 'Oh,' in a tone which plainly said, 'Is _that_ all?'
"Only a few winters since, during a very mild winter, a young lad who
was driving a team called out to me on the street, and said he had a
question to ask me.
"I stopped; and he asked, 'Shall we lose our ice-crop this winter?'
"It was January, and it was New England. It took very little learning
and no alchemy to foretell that the month of February and the
neighborhood of Boston would give ice enough; and I told him that the
ice-crop would be abundant; but I was honest enough to explain to him
that my outlook into the future was no better than his.
"One of the unfavorable results of the attempt to popularize science is
this: the reader of popular scientific books is very likely to think
that he understands the science itself, when he merely understands what
some writer says about science.
"Take, for example, the method of determining the distance of the moon
from the earth--one of the easiest problems in physical astronomy. The
method can be told in a few sentences; yet it took a hundred years to
determine it with any degree of accuracy--and a hundred years, not of
the average work of mankind in science, but a hundred years during which
able minds were bent to the problem.
"Still, with all the school-masters, and all the teaching, and all the
books, the ignorance of the unscientific world is enormous; they are
ignorant both ways--they underrate the scientific people and they
overrate them. There is, on the one hand, the Irish woman who is
disappointed because you cannot tell fortunes, and, on the other hand,
the cultivated woman who supposes that you must know _all_ science.
"I have a friend who wonders that I do not take my astronomical clock to
pieces. She supposes that because I am an astronomer, I must be able to
be a clock-maker, while I do not handle a tool if I can help it! She did
not expect to take her piano to pieces because she was musical! She was
as careful not to tinker it as I was not to tinker the clock, which only
an expert in clock-making was prepared to handle.
"... Only a few weeks since I received a letter from a lady who wished
to come to make me a visit, and to 'scan the heavens,' as she termed it.
Now, just as she wrote, the clock, which I was careful not to meddle
with, had been rapidly gaining time, and I was standing before it,
watching it from hour to hour, and slightly changing its rate by
dropping small weights upon its pendulum. Time is so important an
element with the astronomer, that all else is subordinate to it.
"Then, too, the uneducated assume the unvarying exactness of
mathematical results; while, in reality, mathematical results are often
only approximations. We say the sun is 91,000,000 miles from the earth,
plus or minus a probable error; that is, we are right, probably, within,
say, 100,000 miles; or, the sun is 91,000,000 minus 100,000 miles, or it
is 91,000,000 plus 100,000 miles off; and this probable error is only a
probability.
"If we make one more observation it cannot agree with any one of our
determinations, and it changes our probable error.
[Illustration: BUST OF MARIA MITCHELL.
_From Original made by Miss Emma F. Brigham in 1877_]
"This ignorance of the masses leads to a misconception in two ways; the
little that a scientist can do, they do not understand,--they suppose
him to be godlike in his capacity, and they do not see results; they
overrate him and they underrate him--they underrate his work.
"There is no observatory in this land, nor in any land, probably, of
which the question is not asked, 'Are they doing anything? Why don't we
hear from them? They should make discoveries, they should publish.'
"The one observation made at Greenwich on the planet Neptune was not
published until after a century or more--it was recorded as a star. The
observation had to wait a hundred years, about, before the time had come
when that evening's work should bear fruit; but it was good, faithful
work, and its time came.
"Kepler was years in passing from one of his laws to another, while the
school-boy, to-day, rattles off the three as if they were born of one
breath.
"The scientist should be free to pursue his investigations. He cannot be
a scientist and a school-master. If he pursues his science in all his
intervals from his class-work, his classes suffer on account of his
engrossments; if he devotes himself to his students, science suffers;
and yet we all go on, year after year, trying to work the two fields
together, and they need different culture and different implements.
"1878. In the eclipse of this year, the dark shadow fell first on the
United States thirty-eight degrees west of Washington, and moved towards
the south-east, a circle of darkness one hundred and sixteen miles in
diameter; circle overlapping circle of darkness until it could be mapped
down like a belt.
"The mapping of the dark shadow, with its limitations of one hundred and
sixteen miles, lay across the country from Montana, through Colorado,
northern and eastern Texas, and entered the Gulf of Mexico between
Galveston and New Orleans. This was the region of total eclipse. Looking
along this dark strip on the map, each astronomer selected his bit of
darkness on which to locate the light of science.
"But for the distance from the large cities of the country, Colorado
seemed to be a most favorable part of the shadow; it was little subject
to storms, and reputed to be enjoyable in climate and abundant in
hospitality.
"My party chose Denver, Col. I had a friend who lived in Denver, and she
was visiting me. I sought her at once, and with fear and trembling
asked, 'Have you a bit of land behind your house in Denver where I could
put up a small telescope?' 'Six hundred miles,' was the laconic reply!
"I felt that the hospitality of the Rocky mountains was at my feet.
Space and time are so unconnected! For an observation which would last
two minutes forty seconds, I was offered six hundred miles, after a
journey of thousands.
"A journey from Boston to Denver makes one hopeful for the future of our
country. We had hour after hour and day after day of railroad travel,
over level, unbroken land on which cattle fed unprotected, summer and
winter, and which seemed to implore the traveller to stay and to accept
its richness. It must be centuries before the now unpeopled land of
western Kansas and Colorado can be crowded.
"We started from Boston a party of two; at Cincinnati a third joined us;
at Kansas City we came upon a fourth who was ready to fall into our
ranks, and at Denver two more awaited us; so we were a party of
six--'All good women and true.'
"All along the road it had been evident that the country was roused to a
knowledge of the coming eclipse; we overheard remarks about it; small
telescopes travelled with us, and our landlord at Kansas City, when I
asked him to take care of a chronometer, said he had taken care of fifty
of them in the previous fortnight. Our party had three telescopes and
one chronometer.
"We had travelled so comfortably all along the Santa Fe road, from
Kansas City to Pueblo, that we had forgotten the possibility of other
railroad annoyances than those of heat and dust until we reached Pueblo.
At Pueblo all seemed to change. We left the Santa Fe road and entered
upon that of the Rio Grande.
"Which road was to blame, it is not for me to say, but there was trouble
at once about our 'round-trip ticket.' That settled, we supposed all was
right.
"In sending out telescopes so far as from Boston to Denver, I had
carefully taken out the glasses, and packed them in my trunks. I carried
the chronometer in my hand.
"It was only five hours' travel from Pueblo to Denver, and we went on to
that city. The trunks, for some unexplained reason, or for no reason at
all, chose to remain at Pueblo.
"One telescope-tube reached Denver when we did; but a telescope-tube is
of no value without glasses. We learned that there was a war between the
two railroads which unite at Pueblo, and war, no matter where or when it
occurs, means ignorance and stupidity.
"The unit of measure of value which the railroad man believes in is
entirely different from that in which the scientist rests his faith.
"A war between two railroads seemed very small compared with two minutes
forty seconds of observation of a total eclipse. One was terrestrial,
the other cosmic.
"It was Wednesday when we reached Denver. The eclipse was to occur the
following Monday.
"We haunted the telegraph-rooms, and sent imploring messages. We placed
ourselves at the station, and watched the trains as they tossed out
their freight; we listened to every express-wagon which passed our door
without stopping, and just as we were trying to find if a telescope
could be hired or bought in Denver, the glasses arrived.
"It was now Friday; we must put up tents and telescopes, and test the
glasses.
"It rained hard on Friday--nothing could be done. It rained harder on
Saturday. It rained hardest of all on Sunday, and hail mingled with the
rain. But Monday morning was clear and bright. It was strange enough to
find that we might camp anywhere around Denver. Our hostess suggested to
us to place ourselves on 'McCullough's Addition.' In New York or Boston,
if I were about to camp on private grounds I should certainly ask
permission. In the far West you choose your spot of ground, you dig
post-holes and you pitch tents, and you set up telescopes and inhabit
the land; and then the owner of the land comes to you, and asks if he
may not put up a fence for you, to keep off intruders, and the nearest
residents come to you and offer aid of any kind.
"Our camping-place was near the house occupied by sisters of charity,
and the black-robed, sweet-faced women came out to offer us the
refreshing cup of tea and the new-made bread.
"All that we needed was 'space,' and of that there was plenty.
"Our tents being up and the telescopes mounted, we had time to look
around at the view. The space had the unlimitedness that we usually
connect with sea and sky. Our tents were on the slope of a hill, at the
foot of which we were about six thousand feet above the sea. The plain
was three times as high as the hills of the Hudson-river region, and
there arose on the south, almost from west to east, the peaks upon peaks
of the Rocky mountains. One needs to live upon such a plateau for weeks,
to take in the grandeur of the panorama.
"It is always difficult to teach the man of the people that natural
phenomena belong as much to him as to scientific people. Camping parties
who put up telescopes are always supposed to be corporations with
particular privileges, and curious lookers-on gather around, and try to
enter what they consider a charmed circle. We were remarkably free from
specialists of this kind. Camping on the south-west slope of the hill,
we were hidden on the north and east, and another party which chose the
brow of the hill was much more attractive to the crowd. Our good
serving-man was told to send away the few strollers who approached; even
our friends from the city were asked to remove beyond the reach of
voice.
"There is always some one to be found in every gathering who will not
submit to law. At the time of the total eclipse in Iowa, in 1869, there
passed in and out among our telescopes and observers an unknown, closely
veiled woman. The remembrance of that occasion never comes to my mind
without the accompaniment of a fluttering green veil.
"This time it was a man. How he came among us and why he remained, no
one can say. Each one supposed that the others knew, and that there was
good reason for his presence. If I was under the tent, wiping glasses,
he stood beside me; if the photographer wished to make a picture of the
party, this man came to the front; and when I asked the servant to send
off the half-vagrant boys and girls who stood gazing at us, this man
came up and said to me in a confidential tone, 'They do not understand
the sacredness of the occasion, and the fineness of the conditions.'
There was something regal in his audacity, but he was none the less a
tramp.
"Persons who observe an eclipse of the sun always try to do the
impossible. They seem to consider it a solemn duty to see the first
contact of sun and moon. The moon, when seen in the daytime, looks like
a small faint cloud; as it approaches the sun it becomes wholly unseen;
and an observer tries to see when this unseen object touches the glowing
disc of the sun.
"When we look at any other object than the sun, we stimulate our vision.
A good observer will remain in the dark for a short time before he makes
a delicate observation on a faint star, and will then throw a cap over
his head to keep out strong lights.
"When we look at the sun, we at once try to deaden its light. We protect
our eyes by dark glasses--the less of sunlight we can get the better. We
calculate exactly at what point the moon will touch the sun, and we
watch that point only. The exact second by the chronometer when the
figure of the moon touches that of the sun, is always noted. It is not
only valuable for the determination of longitude, but it is a check on
our knowledge of the moon's motions. Therefore, we try for the
impossible.
"One of our party, a young lady from California, was placed at the
chronometer. She was to count aloud the seconds, to which the three
others were to listen. Two others, one a young woman from Missouri, who
brought with her a fine telescope, and another from Ohio, besides
myself, stood at the three telescopes. A fourth, from Illinois, was
stationed to watch general effects, and one special artist, pencil in
hand, to sketch views.
"Absolute silence was imposed upon the whole party a few minutes before
each phenomenon.
"Of course we began full a minute too soon, and the constrained position
was irksome enough, for even time is relative, and the minute of
suspense is longer than the hour of satisfaction. [Footnote: As the
computed time for the first contact drew near, the breath of the counter
grew short, and the seconds were almost gasped and threatened to become
inaudible, when Miss Mitchell, without moving her eye from the tube of
the telescope, took up the counting, and continued until the young lady
recovered herself, which she did immediately.]
"The moon, so white in the sky, becomes densely black when it is closely
ranging with the sun, and it shows itself as a black notch on the
burning disc when the eclipse begins.
"Each observer made her record in silence, and then we turned and faced
one another, with record in hand--we differed more than a second; it was
a large difference.
"Between first contact and totality there was more than an hour, and we
had little to do but look at the beautiful scenery and watch the slow
motion of a few clouds, on a height which was cloud-land to dwellers by
the sea.
"Our photographer begged us to keep our positions while he made a
picture of us. The only value to the picture is the record that it
preserves of the parallelism of the three telescopes. You would say it
was stiff and unnatural, did you not know that it was the ordering of
Nature herself--they all point to the centre of the solar system.
"As totality approached, all again took their positions. The corona,
which is the 'glory' seen around the sun, was visible at least thirteen
minutes before totality; each of the party took a look at this, and then
all was silent, only the count, on and on, of the young woman at the
chronometer. When totality came, even that ceased.
"How still it was!
"As the last rays of sunlight disappeared, the corona burst out all
around the sun, so intensely bright near the sun that the eye could
scarcely bear it; extending less dazzlingly bright around the sun for
the space of about half the sun's diameter, and in some directions
sending off streamers for millions of miles.
"It was now quick work. Each observer at the telescopes gave a furtive
glance at the un-sunlike sun, moved the dark eye-piece from the
instrument, replaced it by a more powerful white glass, and prepared to
see all that could be seen in two minutes forty seconds. They must note
the shape of the corona, its color, its seeming substance, and they must
look all around the sun for the 'interior planet.'
"There was certainly not the beauty of the eclipse of 1869. Then immense
radiations shot out in all directions, and threw themselves over half
the sky. In 1869, the rosy prominences were so many, so brilliant, so
fantastic, so weirdly changing, that the eye must follow them; now,
scarcely a protuberance of color, only a roseate light around the sun as
the totality ended. But if streamers and prominences were absent, the
corona itself was a great glory. Our special artist, who made the sketch
for my party, could not bear the light.
"When the two minutes forty seconds were over, each observer left her
instrument, turned in silence from the sun, and wrote down brief notes.
Happily, some one broke through all rules of order, and shouted out,
'The shadow! the shadow!' And looking toward the southeast we saw the
black band of shadow moving from us, a hundred and sixty miles over the
plain, and toward the Indian Territory. It was not the flitting of the
closer shadow over the hill and dale: it was a picture which the sun
threw at our feet of the dignified march of the moon in its orbit.
"And now we looked around. What a strange orange light there was in the
north-east! what a spectral hue to the whole landscape! Was it really
the same old earth, and not another planet?
"Great is the self-denial of those who follow science. They who look
through telescopes at the time of a total eclipse are martyrs; they
severely deny themselves. The persons who can say that they have seen a
total eclipse of the sun are those who rely upon their eyes. My aids,
who touched no glasses, had a season of rare enjoyment. They saw
Mercury, with its gleam of white light, and Mars, with its ruddy glow;
they saw Regulus come out of the darkening blue on one side of the sun,
Venus shimmer and Procyon twinkle near the horizon, and Arcturus shine
down from the zenith.