“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 God 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 Vassar, Miss Mitchell 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 Vassar.  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!”