address in Latin, so that every one could understand it. She regarded him attentively, and they then began to converse in the same language on the origin of fountains and the cause of the flow and ebb, like that of the sea, which some springs exhibit. She spoke like a superior intelligence on the subject; I have heard nothing upon it that gave me more satisfaction. After this conversation. Count Belloni invited me to talk with her in the same way on any subject I pleased, in philosophy or mathematics. I was astonished to find that I was expected to speak impromptu and in a language to which I was little used; but, be it as it might, I paid her a handsome compliment, and then we discoursed concerning the way in which mind could be affected by corporeal objects and communicate concerning them with the organs of the brain; and afterward concerning the emanation of light and the primitive colors. Toppin conversed with her on the transparency of bodies and on the properties of certain geometric curves, of which I understood nothing. Evidently Agnesi's parties are hardly of this world!"
When Agnesi was nineteen years old, she had already sustained one hundred and ninety-one philosophical theses.[1] Of course, they are somewhat superficial theses, in which, after having cited the principal views of various authors, Agnesi discussed and affirmed her own opinion. This proves, nevertheless, that she had received a somewhat more solid instruction than was till recently given to the young women of our time. The inquiring quality of her mind and her taste for science are likewise revealed in her correspondence. On April 26, 1733, she received from Father Manara a letter from Rome which resolved some of her doubts concerning ballistics. In another letter she sent Count Charles Belloni the solution of a problem in analytical geometry; and a response from him (July 5, 1735) cleared up some difficulties which she had met in reading the Conic Sections of the Marquis de l'Hôpital, published in 1707, of which she had undertaken to make a commentary.
Not these labors alone engaged her thoughts. Toward her twentieth year, in the very midst of her success, she contemplated retiring from the world to enter a religious society, now suppressed, called the Celeste, or Turquine, from the color of their dress, or Carcanine, from the name of their founder, Giovanni Pietro Carcano. But, in view of the distress that this resolution cost her father,
- ↑ They have been published under the title Propositiones philosophicæ quas crebris disputationibus domi habitis coram clarissimis viris explicabet ex tempore et ab objectis vindicabat Maria Cajetana de Agnesis Mediolanensis (Philosophical propositions which Maria Gaetana Agnesi, of Milan, explained ex tempore and vindicated from objections in frequent disputations held at home in the presence of the most distinguished men), Mediolani (1738), and they are dedicated to Charles Belloni, of Paris.
