CTION--PARENTAGE--LIFE IN SCOTLAND IN THE LAST CENTURY--EARLY
EDUCATION--SCHOOL.

The life of a woman entirely devoted to her family duties and to
scientific pursuits affords little scope for a biography. There are in
it neither stirring events nor brilliant deeds to record; and as my
Mother was strongly averse to gossip, and to revelations of private life
or of intimate correspondence, nothing of the kind will be found in the
following pages. It has been only after very great hesitation, and on
the recommendation of valued friends, who think that some account of so
remarkable and beautiful a character cannot fail to interest the public,
that I have resolved to publish some detached Recollections of past
times, noted down by my mother during the last years of her life,
together with a few letters from eminent men and women, referring almost
exclusively to her scientific works. A still smaller number of her own
letters have been added, either as illustrating her opinions on events
she witnessed, or else as affording some slight idea of her simple and
loving disposition.

Few thoughtful minds will read without emotion my mother's own account
of the wonderful energy and indomitable perseverance by which, in her
ardent thirst for knowledge, she overcame obstacles apparently
insurmountable, at a time when women were well-nigh totally debarred
from education; and the almost intuitive way in which she entered upon
studies of which she had scarcely heard the names, living, as she did,
among persons to whom they were utterly unknown, and who disapproved of
her devotion to pursuits so different from those of ordinary young girls
at the end of the last century, especially in Scotland, which was far
more old-fashioned and primitive than England.

Nor is her simple account of her early days without interest, when, as a
lonely child, she wandered by the seashore, and on the links of
Burntisland, collecting shells and flowers; or spent the clear, cold
nights at her window, watching the starlit heavens, whose mysteries she
was destined one day to penetrate in all their profound and sublime
laws, making clear to others that knowledge which she herself had
acquired, at the cost of so hard a struggle.

It was not only in her childhood and youth that my mother's studies
encountered disapproval. Not till she became a widow, had she perfect
freedom to pursue them. The first person--indeed the only one in her
early days--who encouraged