When, some thirty years ago, the extraordinary young mathematician, Truman Henry Safford, first attracted the attention of New England by his rare powers, I well remember the pains that were taken to place him under instruction by the ablest Harvard professors:  the greater his abilities, the more needful that he should have careful and symmetrical training.  The men of science did not say, “Stand off! let him alone! let him strive patiently until he has achieved something positively valuable, and he may be sure of prompt and generous recognition—­when he is fifty years old.”  If such a course would have been mistaken and ungenerous if applied to Professor Safford, why is it not something to be regretted that it was applied to Mrs. Somerville?  In her case, the mischief was done:  she was, happily, strong enough to bear it; but, as the English critics say, we never shall know what science has lost by it.  We can do nothing for her now; but we could do something for future women like her, by pointing this obvious moral for their benefit, instead of being content with a mere tardy recognition of success, after a woman has expended half a century in struggle.

It is commonly considered to be a step forward in civilization, that whereas ancient and barbarous nations exposed children to special hardships, in order to kill off the weak and toughen the strong, modern nations aim to rear all alike carefully, without either sacrificing or enfeebling.  If we apply this to muscle, why not to mind? and if to men’s minds, why not to women’s?  Why use for men’s intellects, which are claimed to be stronger, the forcing process,—­offering, for instance, many thousand dollars a year in gratuities at our colleges, that young men may be induced to come and learn,—­and only withhold assistance from the weaker minds of women?  A little schoolgirl once told me that she did not object to her teacher’s showing partiality, but thought she “ought to show partiality to all alike.”  If all our university systems are wrong, and the proper diet for mathematical genius consists of fifty years’ snubbing, let us employ it, by all means; but let it be applied to both sexes.

That it is the duty of women, even under disadvantageous circumstances, to prove their purpose by labor, to “verify their credentials,” is true enough; but this moral is only part of the moral of Mrs. Somerville’s book, and is cruelly incomplete without the other half.  What a garden of 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.