roses
was Mrs. Somerville's life, according to some comfortable critics! "All
that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and whine, or
fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly to Mrs.
Somerville. And the reason was that she never asked for anything until she
had earned it; or, rather, she never asked at all, but was content to
earn." Naturally and quietly! You might as well say that Garrison fought
slavery "quietly," or that Frederick Douglass's escape came to him
"naturally." Turn to the book itself, and see with what strong, though
never actually bitter, feeling, the author looks back upon her hard
struggle.

"I was intensely ambitious to excel in something; for I felt in my
own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in
creation than that assigned them in my early days, which was very
low" (p. 60). "Nor ... should I have had courage to ask any of them
a question, for I should have been laughed at. I was often very sad
and forlorn; not a hand held out to help me" (p. 47). "My father
came home for a short time, and, somehow or other finding out what I
was about, said to my mother, 'Peg, we must put a stop to this, or
we shall have Mary in a strait-jacket one of these days'" (p. 54).
"I continued my mathematical and other pursuits, but under great
disadvantages; for, although my husband did not prevent me from
studying, I met with no sympathy whatever from him, as he had a very
low opinion of the capacity of my sex, and had neither knowledge of
nor interest in science of any kind" (p. 75). "I was considered
eccentric and foolish; and my conduct was highly disapproved of by
many, especially by some members of my own family" (p. 80). "A man
can always command his time under the plea of business: a woman is
not allowed any such excuse" (p. 164). And so on.

At last, in 1831,--Mrs. Somerville being then fifty-one,--her work on "The
Mechanism of the Heavens" appeared. Then came universal recognition,
generous if not prompt, a tardy acknowledgment. "Our relations," she says,
"and others who had so severely criticised and ridiculed me, astonished at
my success, were now loud in my praise."[1] No doubt. So were, probably,
Cinderella's sisters loud in her praise, when the prince at last took her
from the chimney-corner, and married her. They had kept for themselves, to
be sure, as long as they could, the d