Mary Somerville

Scottish scientist and writer

• Born: December 26, 1780
• Birthplace: Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland
• Died: November 29, 1872
• Place of death: Naples, Italy

After preparing a celebrated translation and explanation of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Traité de mécanique celeste, Somerville became a central figure in British and American scientific networks, and her widely read books helped define the disciplines within the physical sciences.

Early Life

Mary Somerville was born Mary Fairfax, the fifth of seven children, only four of whom survived to adulthood. Her Scottish mother, Margaret Charters, was the second wife of her father, William George Fairfax, an English admiral who fought with James Wolfe at Quebec during the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763. Although Mary attended boarding school for one year at the age of ten, her parents believed that women should develop domestic skills and not pursue formal education. When she was a teenager, however, she became intrigued by mathematics problems she found in a women’s magazine and began to teach herself. An uncle encouraged her, and she was able to obtain John Bonnycastle’s An Introduction to Algebra (1782) and Euclid’s Elements of Geometry when she was fifteen.

In 1804, Mary married a cousin, Samuel Greig, a captain in the Russian navy who was stationed in London, where Mary gave birth to two sons, in 1805 and 1806. She was unable to continue her studies during that period, but after Greig died in 1807, she returned to her birthplace in Scotland, Jedburgh, and began to educate herself openly. She was assisted by professors from the nearby University of Edinburgh, such as John Playfair and John Leslie. She also became a friend of Henry Brougham and other founders of the Edinburgh Review, with whom she shared her Whiggish political views. Her most significant mentor was William Wallace, who became the professor of mathematics at Edinburgh after Playfair died in 1819.

Mary also gained support from her second husband, William Somerville, a first cousin whom she married in 1812. A surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, William studied geology and mineralogy with Mary. Mary also read French mathematics and astronomy under Wallace’s tutelage and studied Greek and botany.

In 1814, one of Mary’s first sons died. The following year she had another son, who died the same year. She and William also had three daughters together: Margaret (born in 1813), Mary (1815), and Martha (1817). In 1816, William moved the family to London, where he took up a position as principal inspector for the Army Medical Board. After his job was lost to government budget-cutting in 1817, he worked only occasionally. He and Mary used his free time to visit Jean-Baptiste Biot, François Arago, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and other scholars in Paris. In 1819, William was appointed director of the Royal Military Hospital in Chelsea, where he remained until 1836.

Life’s Work

Although Mary believed too much study was responsible for her ten-year-old daughter Margaret’s death in 1823, she continued her own studies and prepared her first scientific paper, on the relationship between sunlight and magnetism. William communicated it to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1826. Although Mary’s conclusions in that paper proved to be incorrect, her friends encouraged her to continue with public presentations.

In 1827, Henry Brougham asked Mary to translate Laplace’s Traité de mécanique celeste (5 vols., 1798-1827), a treatise demonstrating that the solar system was self-regulating, as was predicted by Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory. After consulting with Augustus de Morgan and Charles Babbage, she added to her translation a “preliminary dissertation” that explained the mathematics readers needed to understand Laplace’s ideas. Her introduction also set Laplace’s work in historical context and presented some of her own mathematical work. Her translation, with her commentary, was published as The Mechanism of the Heavens in 1831. The book was immediately pirated in the United States; translated into French, German, and Italian; and adopted as a textbook at the University of Cambridge in 1837.

In 1834, Mary followed this work with the two-volume On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences . This book’s explanation of interconnections among astronomy, physics, magnetism, meteorology, and physical geography secured her fame as an expositor. The English physicistDavid Brewster praised her book’s argument—although he was unsure women would read it—and the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell later described it as a seminal work of the nineteenth century. During that same year, Mary was elected to honorary memberships in the Royal Irish Academy and the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle of Geneva. In 1835, she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Royal Society commissioned a bust of her for its main hall. To encourage others to synthesize and explain science, British prime ministerRobert Peel awarded Mary an annual pension of two hundred pounds—an amount increased to three hundred pounds in 1837. Meanwhile, ten editions of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences appeared during the first four decades after its original publication.

Mary’s husband William was frequently ill, and both Mary and William had substantial financial obligations to their relatives. The family’s poor financial situation prompted the family to reside in Italy, where the cost of living was much lower, almost continuously after 1838. In 1836, Mary wrote a paper for the French Academy of Science that was delivered by François Arago. In 1845, she wrote a paper for the Royal Society that was delivered by John Herschel.

Through these years, Mary maintained her scientific friendships, which also included Charles Lyell and Alexander von Humboldt. In 1848, she published Physical Geography . This book covered the same subject as a book by Humboldt but was organized differently. Her division of geography into physical regions, rather than nations, and her description of the inhabitants of earth, sea, and air made the book a popular text. She also relied on Lyell’s uniformitarian geology and assigned a central role to solar energy. Although her acceptance of the theory of an old Earth led to denunciations from the House of Commons and the Church of England, Physical Geography went through seven editions.

Despite the controversy her book raised, Mary continued to receive honors. In 1857, she was elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society, and the Italian Geographical Society made her a member in 1870. Meanwhile, she made significant revisions in some of her books as they were republished, but she never incorporated Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection into Physical Geography.

Mary supported woman suffrage and signed a petition in 1862 that urged the University of London to permit women to sit for degrees. She finished her last book, On Molecular and Microscopic Science , in 1869. During that same year, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society and presented with the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Gold Medal and the Victor Emmanuel Gold Medal of the Geographical Society of Florence. She received at least twenty-five awards in all, of which a dozen came from Italian organizations.

Mary’s last decades were saddened by the deaths of her husband in 1860 and her only surviving son, Woronzow Greig, in 1865. Greig had become a lawyer and had been elected to the Royal Society in 1853. Although Mary’s daughters, Martha and Mary, outlived her, they never married. Mary Somerville died in Florence, Italy, on November 29, 1872, one month short of her ninety-second birthday. After her death, an island in the Arctic Ocean was named for her in recognition of her interest in polar exploration, and Oxford University’s Somerville College was named after her when it opened in 1879.

Significance

Mary Somerville was viewed as the leading woman scientist of her era. She was part of the last generation that was able to understand all of the scientific knowledge then extant. Male intellectuals treated her as an equal; they praised her publications and accepted her definitions of the physical sciences. Because no clear boundaries between professional and amateur scientists then existed, Mary was able to study independently and participate in scientific culture alongside premier scientists, just as men did who learned science informally. Indeed, both provincial and foreign scientists considered it essential to call on Mary when they visited Europe after 1830.

Like most women of her time, Mary Somerville believed that women were incapable of making truly original discoveries. Although male scientists appreciated her work, they offered her only honorary memberships in their learned societies. Curiously, gender-based perceptions of Somerville also reversed during her lifetime. After she died in 1872, women eulogized her as a scientific pioneer, while men developed a sentimental view of her as a symbolic curiosity. Later scholars have wrestled with interpreting the meaning of her roles and contributions.

Bibliography

Chapman, Allan. Mary Somerville and the World of Science. Bath, England: Canopus, 2004. A brief but lively introduction to Somerville’s life that summarizes her background and writings, putting them into the wider context of nineteenth century science.

Neeley, Katherine A. Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Although vague on chronology and dates, Neeley’s book takes a provocative approach by treating Somerville’s activities and the ways in which others celebrated her as a metaphor for the illumination of science.

Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. Patterson catalogued Somerville’s manuscripts and produced the most thorough account of her life’s work and influences.

Sanderson, Marie. “Mary Somerville: Her Work in Physical Geography.” Geographical Review 64 (1974): 410-420. Somerville’s contributions to meteorology and climatology are described and assessed in the context of her famous male scientific friends.

Sheffield, Suzanne Le-May. Women and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2004. A pioneering attempt at a general study of women’s education and participation in science. Somerville is covered in the section on women scientists in the men’s world.

Somerville, Martha. Personal Recollections, From Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874. Somerville’s autobiography, published posthumously and edited by her daughter to omit scientific details and people deemed uninteresting.