mind of this young person, and had appeared to slacken his march; and I, between the sight of so young an age and the charm of such an elocution, do not know which to believe—what I see or what I hear."[1]
It was not only in French that Agnesi made wonderful progress. She followed also the lessons in Latin which the Abbate D. Nicolo Jemelli gave to one of her brothers, and when nine years old she translated from Italian into Latin an essay which she recited before several auditors. She thus maintained—nearly two hundred years before Marya Chéliga and Maria Pognon—the right of women to study letters, the fine arts, and science if they feel called to it. This essay is dedicated to Dom Augustino Tolotta, a friend of her family and a very well educated man, to whom she modestly attributed all the merit of it. She mentions in it, among other celebrated women, Cornelia Piscopia (the oracle of seven languages), to whom the University of Padua awarded the laureate of philosophy, and Madame Dacier, translator of Homer.
Agnesi's coming out was then a brilliant one, and the rest of her life did not contradict the hopes it awakened in the minds of her friends. When eleven years of age she knew enough Greek to recite the Office of the Virgin in that language, a pious practice which she kept up till her death. Long before reaching her twentieth year, besides speaking Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, she was acquainted with German and Spanish. These many idioms, according to Mazzuchelli,[2] caused no confusion in her mind, and she translated freely from one language into another. She also left in manuscript a Greek translation of Il Combattimento spirituale of P. Lorenzo Scupoli, the two books of Supplements to Quintus Curtius of Freikshemius, translated into French, Italian, German, and Greek; three small volumes of a Greek and Latin Lexicon containing more than thirteen thousand words; and a Greek translation of a work on mythology.[3]
Miss Agnesi's health was seriously disturbed by so close application, and in December, 1730, the doctors advised her father to find some way of diverting her mind from her studies. But she, in the ardor of her application, doing everything with passion, followed
- ↑ The sonnet was dedicated, "Alia nobile fanciulla D. Maria Gaetano Agnesi, che nell' eta cinque parla mirabilmente Francese" (To the noble child Donna Maria Gaetano Agnesi, who, when five years old, spoke French admirably), and was written in Italian. We give it in an English unversified translation.
- ↑ Mazzuchelli. Gli Scrittori d'ltalia, vol. i (1795), Part I, p. 198.
- ↑ The Ambrosian Library of Milan possesses, besides, numerous scientific manuscripts of Agnesi which bear witness to her prodigious industry. The principal among them are: Metâfisica e fisica, fisica e matematica, Studi di Cosmografia, Gnomonica geometrica, Fisica e matematica, Studi e correspondenze sopra varii punte del Trattato analitico.
