Mary Somerville Quotes

It is not always possible to come to an agreement before one goes to sleep but it is possible to go to sleep in a loving and peaceable manner knowing that the problem can be worked out in love at a later time.

The word "scientist" was coined for a woman – the Scottish polymath Mary Somerville. When John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist, organised a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he had Somerville put her signature first on the petition

Of the early founders, the most eminent proponent of physical geography as a scientific entity was undoubtedly the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. On his many travels, he combined observations with measurements of temperature, pressure, and the Earth’s magnetic field, and made generalizations about the geographical distribution of vegetation, global-scale patterns of temperature (depicted by isotherms on maps), the ways in which temperature falls and vegetation varies with increasing altitude (on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, for example), the alignment of volcanoes, and the course of ocean currents. In his major works, written around the middle of the 19th century, such as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe , published in 1849, he emphasized not only relationships within the natural geo-ecosphere but also linkages to human societies. A year earlier, Mary Somerville, based at the University of Oxford, published Physical Geography and defined the subject as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings and the causes of that distribution’.

Mary herself is named for three real-life Marys: Mary Shelley, of course; Mary Anning, expert fossil-hunter and self-taught palaeontologist; and the celebrated mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville, so-called ‘Queen of Science’ of the nineteenth century.

So numerous are the objects which meet our view in the heavens, that we cannot imagine a part of space where some light would not strike the eye : but as the fixed stars would not be visible at such distances, if they did not shine by their own light, it is reasonable to infer that they are suns ; and if so, they are in all probability attended by systems of opaque bodies, revolving about them as the planets do about ours.

Perhaps the day may come when even gravitation, no longer regarded as an ultimate principle, may be resolved into a yet more general cause, embracing every law that regulates the material world.