ABSTRACT
Late, when the house was still, parents and servants having retired, young Mary Somerville (1780-1872) made her solitary way by candlelight through volumes of Euclid, Virgil, and Shakespeare. Quietly, so her secret passion would not be disclosed, Mary night after night absorbed much of the scholarship that would one day enable her to become a renowned English scientist. But familial disapproval and censorship frequently interrupted her studies in this last decade of the eighteenth century, forcing her to momentarily abandon her books. Once, noticing the supply of candles dwindling at a suspiciously rapid pace, the servants were told to remove them from her room when she went to bed. "We must put an end to this," declared her father, "or we shall have Mary in a strait jacket one of these days. "1
