nation which would be thought easy enough at a modern elementary science class. But I had gained for myself what these science classes so seldom infuse into the pupils-an enthusiastic love of the subject, and a determination to get somehow at the living truth of which the rocks are the records. I had learnt to treat fossils not as mere dead mineral matter, or as mere curiosities valuable in proportion to their rarity or perfection of preservation, but as enduring records of former life; not as species to fill a place in a zoölogical system, or specimens to take up so much room in a museum, but as the remains of once living organisms, which formed part of a creation as real as that in which we ourselves pass our existence. They were witnesses of early ages in our planet's history, and were ready to tell their tale if one could only learn how to read it from them. Few occupations possess greater power of fascination than to marshal all these witnesses, and elicit from them the evidence which allows us to restore one after another the successive conditions through which the solid land has passed. To realize how this is done, and to take part in the doing of it, is for a boy a lifelong advantage. He may never become a geologist in any sense, but he gains such an enlarged view of nature, and such a vivid conception of the long evolution through which the present condition of things has been reached, as can be mastered in no other way. A single excursion under sympathetic and intelligent guidance to an instructive quarry, river ravine, or sea-shore, is worth many books and a long course of systematic lectures.

THE END

SONYA KOVALEVSKY

A RUSSIAN WOMAN PIONEER AND MATHEMATICAL GENIUS

1850-1891

(INTRODUCTORY NOTE)

Sónya Kovalevsky stands unique among pioneer women as a mathematical genius. Born in Russia of noble family, at a time when the unrest resulting in higher education for women was just dawning, she showed such determination, lofty character and real genius that she led her sex in mathematical achievement. Her description of her sensitive and visionary childhood is so truly and intimately drawn, that all who educate children should ponder it. The sacrifice of herself in marriage so as to secure educational freedom reads like a romance. Her devotion to mathematical study makes one rejoice to learn that she conquered the prejudice against women and became a university student in exclusive Heidelberg. Later, in 1884, she was appointed Professor at the University of Stockholm. In 1888 she won the prize with her work entitled "On a Particular Case of the Problem of Rotation of a Heavy Body Around a Fixed Point" from the French Academy of Sciences, pronounced "a remarkable work, rendering extraordinary service to mathematical physics." The jury of the Academy made the award in utter ignorance that the winner was a woman.

The student husband taken in her youth, with whom she lived a truly romantic and gently affectionate life, died early; and Sónya's later career became "a wonderfully perfect mental and spiritual record of a woman, upon whom the union of a masculine mind with a feminine heart imposes the task of solving the opposite problems of life which all women must face.'

While traveling, she met Anna Carlotta Leffler, Duchess of Cajanello, who became her devoted friend and continued her biography beyond the point where Sónya herself laid aside the pen of her "Recollections of Childhood." The Duchess draws a beautiful picture of their womanly friendship, of Sonya's depth of feeling and devoted affection for the noted explorer Nansen. Sónya was sadly disappointed in love though successful in science. She died at the early age of forty-one.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD 1

I SHOULD like to know whether any one can definitely fix that moment of his existence when, for the first time, a distinct conception of his own personality, his own ego, the first glimmer of conscious life, arose within him. I cannot, in the least. When I begin to sort out and classify my earliest recollections, the same thing always happens with me: these recollections disperse before me. At times it seems to me that I have found that first definite impression which has left a distinct trace in my memory; but as soon as I concentrate my thoughts on it for a while, other impressions, of a still more remote period, begin to peep forth and acquire form. And the difficulty of it is that I cannot myself in the least determine which of these impressions I really remember; that is to say, I cannot decide which of them I really lived through, and which of them I only heard about later on,-in my childhood, and imagine that I recall, when, in reality, I only remember the accounts of them. Worse still, I can never succeed in evoking a single one of these original recollections in all its purity; I involuntarily add to it something foreign during the very process of recalling it.

At any rate, this picture is among the first which presents itself every time that I begin to recall the very earliest years of my life.

A chiming of bells. An odor of incense. A throng of people comes out of the church. Nurse leads me by the hand from the church porch, carefully shielding me from being jostled. "Don't hurt the child!" she repeats every moment, in a beseeching tone, to the people who are crowding about us. As we emerge from the church, one of nurse's acquaintances approaches, clad in a long under-cassock (he must have been a deacon or a chanter), and gives her one of the little sacramental loaves. "Eat, and may health attend you, madam," he says to her.

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Copyright, 1895, by the Century Co. Reprinted by permission.

A prosforá: the little leavened double loaf, from bits of which the communion is prepared. When more than one prosforá is used the auxiliary loaves are generally given to persons of distinction who may be present. Such a gift is regarded as a compliment and favor.

"Come, now; tell us your name, my clever child," he says to me.

I make no reply, but stare at him with all my eyes.

“'T is shameful, miss, not to know your name!" says the chanter, jeeringly.

"Tell him, my dear, 'My name is Sónetchka, and my father is General Krukovsky,'" nurse prompts me.

I try to repeat after her, but it must have been a failure, for nurse and her friend break out laughing.

Nurse's friend accompanies us home. I dance about all the way, and repeat nurse's words, mangling them after my own fashion. Evidently this is a new fact to me, and I try to engrave it in my memory.

As we approach our house, the chanter points out the gate to me.

"You see, little báryshnya [miss], there is a hook hanging on the gate," he says. "When you forget your papa's name, all you have to do is to think, 'A hook [kriuk] hangs on Krukovsky's gate,' and you will immediately remember it."

And thus, shameful as it is for me to confess it, this wretched chanter's pun imprinted itself on my memory, and constituted an era in my existence; from it I date my chronology, the first invasion upon me of a distinct idea as to who I was, and what was my position in the world.

As I reflect upon the matter now, I think I must have been two or three years old, and that this scene took place in Moscow, where I was born. My father served in the artillery, and we were often compelled to move about from town to town, accompanying him in accordance with the requirements of his military duties.

After this first scene, which is distinctly preserved in my memory, comes another long gap, against whose gray, misty background divers little wayside scenes detach themselves, only in the shape of bright, scattered spots: picking up pebbles on the highway, bivouacs at posting-stations, my sister's doll which I threw out of the carriage window-a series of detached, but tolerably clear pictures.

My coherent recollections begin with me only at the age of five years, and when we lived in Kaluga. There were three

of us children then: my sister Aniuta was six years older than I, and my brother Fedya was three years younger.

At the age of five, something strange began to take place in me a feeling of involuntary distress, of anguish, began to come over me at times. I have a vivid recollection of this feeling. It generally fell upon me if I were left alone in the room at the approach of twilight. I would be playing with my toys, thinking of nothing. All at once I would look up and see behind me a sharp, black strip of shadow, creeping out from under the bed, or from the corner. A sensation would seize upon me as if some strange presence had crept into the room; and this new, unfamiliar presence would suddenly clutch my heart so painfully, that I flew headlong in search of nurse, whose proximity usually had the power to soothe me. It sometimes happened, however, that this torturing sensation did not pass off for a long while, for the space of several hours.

I believe that many nervous children experience something similar. In such cases, it is usually asserted that the child is afraid of darkness, but this expression is entirely inaccurate. In the first place, the sensation experienced in these circumstances is very complicated, and much more nearly resembles anguish than fear; in the second place, it is not evoked by the darkness itself, or by any fancies therewith connected, but precisely by the feeling of the oncoming darkness. I remember, also, that a very similar feeling came over me in my childhood, under entirely different circumstances; for example, if, during my walks, I suddenly espied before me a big, half-built house, with bare brick walls, and empty openings instead of windows. I experienced it, also, in summer, if I lay on my back on the ground, and gazed up into the cloudless sky.

Other symptoms of great nervousness also began to make their appearance in me: my disgust, which approached fear in its intensity, for all sorts of physical monstrosities. If a two-headed chicken or a three-legged calf was mentioned in my presence, I began to tremble all over, and then, the following night, I inevitably saw the monster in my dreams, and woke nurse with a piercing scream. Even now I remember the three-legged man who persecuted me in my dreams during the whole of my childhood.