ONE of the most extraordinary Scottish women of the 19th century is now a familiar face to most of us, or at least those who have a Royal Bank of Scotland £10 note. For the face on the polymer tenner is that of Mary Somerville, the brilliant scientist and writer whose influence on the Victorian era was profound.

A product of hthe latter part of the Scottish Enlightenment, Somerville was an astronomer, cosmologist, mathematician, polymath, physicist, geographer, campaigner for women’s rights and above all a wonderful writer who made science comprehensible for people eager for knowledge. She was acclaimed as the “Queen of Science”, not least because in 1834 she was the first person to be described in print as a “scientist”, and this in an age when women were very much second class citizens.

Mary Fairfax was born on December 26, 1780, the daughter of Commander William Fairfax RN who would later go on to become an admiral and be knighted. Her mother was Margaret Charters, daughter of Samuel Charters, the Solicitor of Customs for Scotland.

She was born in her uncle’s manse in Jedburgh but the family hailed from Burntisland in Fife where at first she received little or no education other than the basics of reading and counting, before she was eventually and briefly allowed to go to a boarding school in Musselburgh where she studied mathematics, French, Italian, music and dancing. Her exceptional intelligence led her to inquire about everything around her and start her lifelong study of astronomy in particular.

As a teenager she had access to the library of her uncle, Thomas Somerville, and she soon taught herself Latin and Greek. Her father did not approve, as she wrote in her memoirs: “I sat up very late reading Euclid. The servants, however, told my mother… whereupon an order was given to take away my candle as soon as I was in bed. I had, however, already gone through the first six books of Euclid, and now I was thrown on my memory, which I exercised by beginning at the first book, and demonstrating in my mind a certain number of problems every night, till I could nearly go through the whole.

“My father came home for a short time, and, somehow or other, finding out what I was about, said to my mother, ‘Peg, we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a straitjacket one of these days.’”

Mary finally gained a real education and threw herself furiously into her studies of science while also learning to write properly. She was no dour bluestocking, however. Attractive and sociable, Mary moved easily into polite society, helped by her father’s knighthood after the great naval victory in the Battle of Camperdown in 1797.

Mary married her cousin Samuel Greig on June 28, 1804. An entry in the Old Parish Register for Burntisland shows that they married “after regular proclamation”. She would have two sons by Greig over the next three years.

He was a captain in the Russian navy, and was appointed that country’s naval commissioner and vice-consul in London, where Mary would both be a fine hostess and a correspondent with many of the leading scientific figures of the day.

She wrote of this period: “I was intensely ambitious to excel in something, for I felt in my own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my early days, which was very low.

“Although my husband did not prevent me from studying, I met with no sympathy whatever from him, as he had a very low opinion of the capacity of my sex.”

She clearly learned to balance motherhood, her society duties and her scientific pursuits, though it was not always easy as this quotation of hers shows: “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.”

Greig died in 1807, and Mary returned to Scotland with her children. She took up residence in Edinburgh and due to her considerable inheritance from Greig and family connections she was able to get what she most wanted – education by the leading teachers of the day.

Five years after Greig’s death, Mary’s second marriage took place. It is recorded in the Old Parish Register for Edinburgh that she married her cousin Dr William Somerville of the army on May 16, 1812. She would have two daughters by him, before the whole family had to move to London for his work in 1816. Her second husband very much encouraged her science, and she impressed many of the leading scientists of the day with her aptitude and clear thinking.

James David Forbes, later to become the principal of the University of St Andrews, was in London at the time and wrote about her: “Below middle size, fair, countenance not particularly expressive except eyes which are piercing. Short-sighted. Manners the simplest possible. Her conversation very simple and pleasing. Simplicity not showing itself in abstaining from scientific subjects with which she is so well acquainted, but in being ready to talk on them all with the naiveté of a child and the utmost apparent unconsciousness of the rarity of such knowledge as she possesses, so that it requires a moment’s reflection to be aware that one is hearing something very extraordinary from the mouth of a woman.”

In 1826 she published her first scientific paper, an absolute rarity for a woman in those days, and it was well received by the Royal Society – even though her conclusions on solar rays were later proved wrong. It brought her to the attention of the lawyer and politician Henry Brougham who had founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. He encouraged her to translate a famous work by the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, known as the Newton of France, which she published as Mechanism of the Heavens.

MARY Somerville was now a phenomenon. Her fellow Scot Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, wrote that she was “certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe – a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman. She is also a great natural philosopher and mineralogist”.

The National:

Mary now embarked on her greatest work – popularising science. She was the Tomorrow’s World or Brian Cox or Carl Sagan of her day. That she was on friendly terms with pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and Michael Faraday – like herself, he was largely self-taught – allowed her to write with authority on a range of subjects.

On the Connection of the Physical Sciences was published by her fellow Scot John Murray in 1834. Those links with leading scientists in the UK and France allowed her to write an up-to-date account of scientific pursuits of the day – physics, astronomy, meteorology and what was then known as physical geography.

The book was a masterpiece of concise and clear writing, all of it backed up by her copious reference notes. It was a triumph, and three more editions came out in 1835, 1836, and 1837, effectively acting as an annual report on science.

What many acclaim as her greatest work, Physical Geography, was then published by John Murray and it became an instant best-seller.

The book was revolutionary in viewing humans as “a fellow-inhabitant of the globe with other created things, yet influencing them to a certain extent by his actions, and influenced in return”.

This was her, writing 20 years before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution: “Who shall declare the time allotted to the human race, when the generations of the most insignificant insect also existed for unnumbered ages? Yet man is also to vanish in the ever-changing course of events. The earth is to be burnt up, and the elements are to melt with fervent heat – to be again reduced to chaos – possibly to be renovated and adorned for other races of beings. These stupendous changes may be but cycles in those great laws of the universe, where all is variable but the laws themselves and He who has ordained them.”

She also hinted that she was looking at life in a Darwinian way: “No circumstance in the natural world is more inexplicable than the diversity of form and colour in the human race.”

Her first love remained astronomy, however, which she described as affording “the most extensive example of the connection of physical sciences. In it are combined the sciences of number and quantity, or rest and motion”.

She added: “In it we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motion of animate and inanimate beings, and is a sensible in the descent of the rain-drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon.

“So numerous are the objects which meet our view in the heavens, that we cannot imagine a point of space where some light would not strike the eye;—innumerable stars, thousands of double and multiple systems, clusters in one blaze with their tens of thousands of stars, and the nebulae amazing us by the strangeness of their forms and the incomprehensibility of their nature, till at last, from the limit of our senses, even these thin and airy phantoms vanish in the distance.”

On science in general she declared it should be “regarded as the pursuit of truth, which can only be attained by patient and unprejudiced investigation, wherein nothing is to be attempted, nothing so minute as to be justly disregarded, must ever afford occupation of consummate interest, and subject of elevated meditation”.

The honours and awards began to arrive. In 1835, she and Caroline Herschel became the first women to be allowed membership of the Royal Astronomical Society. That same year she was awarded an annual pension of £200, later increased to £300, by the UK Government in recognition of her work in communicating science to a wider audience. The Royal Irish Academy made her a fellow and later she would receive awards from French and Italian scientific societies as a well as the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

Moving to Italy as her husband’s health deteriorated, she continued publishing and writing on various sciences into her eighties. She had always been liberal-minded “but never a republican” as she wrote and in 1868 was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s unsuccessful petition for women’s suffrage.

She also wrote her memoirs to encourage women to study, completing them shortly before she died at the age of 91 in Naples on November 29, 1872, recognised by all as the most famous woman of science.

There are many places and institutions named after Mary, notably Somerville College of Oxford University. When RBS was choosing the scientist to adorn its tenner, Mary Somerville got 4200 votes, twice as many as James Clerk Maxwell with Thomas Telford in third. She is quoted on the note: “Anyone who has observed the reflection of the waves from a wall on the side of a river after the passage of a steam-boat, will have a perfect idea of the reflection of sound and light.”

Maxwell was directly influenced by Somerville. He will be our subject of next week.