Somerville, Mary (1780–1872)

Mary somerville, writer on science, was born Mary Fairfax on December 26, 1780, in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland. She grew up in Burntisland, Fife, where she studied on her own, despite her father's discouragement. In 1804, she married her cousin, Samuel Greig (1778–1807). They moved to London, where Mary continued to study mathematics and took French lessons. She had two sons with whom she returned to Burntisland after Greig's death in 1807.

Now a widow of independent means, Mary used family connections to enter Edinburgh social and intellectual circles, receiving instruction by correspondence. In 1812, she married another cousin, William Somerville (1771–1860), an army doctor with an active interest in science who, unlike her first husband, encouraged her studies. In 1816 the Somervilles and their two daughters moved to London. Mary and her husband became active in scientific circles, and conversations with men of science greatly expanded her knowledge and understanding. She made contact with several French scientists by correspondence and on a visit to the continent in 1817–18 consolidated her understanding of the advanced mathematics being pioneered in France.

In 1827, Somerville was asked to prepare for publication a concise English version of Laplace's Mécanique Céleste [The Mechanism of the Heavens] (1798–1827), which laid out Laplace's nebular hypothesis of the solar system. Somerville consulted leading astronomers and mathematicians to produce the version in English (1831) which covered four of Laplace's five volumes. Her introduction was published separately as Preliminary Dissertation to the Mechanism of the Heavens (1832). The Mechanism was adopted in 1837 as a textbook at Cambridge University. Close contacts with scientists in France and England made Somerville's second book, On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1834), an up-to-date account of astronomy and physics, with sections on meteorology and physical geography. Its accessible style made it immensely successful and its 10 successive editions acted as progress reports for the physical sciences.

From 1838, the Somervilles lived in Italy for William's health, but Mary continued her work. Her two-volume Physical Geography was complete by 1842 but remained unpublished until 1848 and was thus beaten to the press by the first volumes of Friedrich Von Humboldt's Kosmos (1845). It was, however, the first English-language textbook in the field and immediately successful, its publication coinciding with the establishment of geography at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Unlike earlier geographies, which confined themselves to describing the location of phenomena, often listing [Page 1642]them country by country, Somerville was interested in causality, and this led her to locate phenomena with respect to physical regions rather than to nation states. Like the successive editions of Physical Sciences, the seven editions of Physical Geography (latterly edited by H.W. Bates) became something of a digest of current thinking in the field.

Mary Somerville was widely honored by scientific societies in Europe and the United States, though restrictions on women prevented her election to many of them. She died in Naples on November 29, 1872. She was not an original scientist, and her commanding contemporary reputation declined soon after her death. Recently her exceptional talents for synthesis and presentation, which brought scientific knowledge and understanding in several fields to a wide contemporary audience, have regained recognition, and in particular she is recognized as a pioneering woman in a field dominated by men. Somerville College, Oxford, (founded in 1879 as a women's college) commemorates her name.

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