and authority which she had acquired by her learning," says Socrates, "she sometimes came to the judges with singular modesty. Nor was she anything abashed to appear thus among a crowd of men; for all persons, by reason of her extraordinary discretion, did at the same time both reverence and admire her."
Unfortunately this wonderful woman was to become a martyr of science. The population of Alexandria was split into three hostile groups—the Pagans, the Jews, and the Christians. The latter, under the leadership of the patriarch Cyril, assailed in violent zeal Jews as well as pagans, and heretics or supposed heretics alike, driving them by thousands from the city, destroying their synagogues and temples, and pillaging their houses. It was during one of these riots, that the illustrious Hypatia was attacked by a mob of vicious monks, torn from her carriage, dragged into a church, stripped naked and clubbed to death. Then the murderers in fanatic frenzy tore the body to pieces, carried the limbs to a public square and burnt them to ashes. This happened in Lent 415.
All the writings of Hypatia, among them her treatise "On the Astronomical Canon of Diophantus" and another "On the Conics of Apollonius" are lost. Most probably they too were destroyed by the fanatic Christian mobs, who, after the murder of Hypatia, extinguished the Greek School of philosophers and scientists at Alexandria.—
Astronomy, probably the most ancient of the sciences, has since early days exerted a singular attraction on women.
Herman Davis, in his essay "Women Astronomers," published in the reports of Columbia University, New York, gives the names of a large number of women astronomers, beginning with several of classic times. Of the Egyptians he mentions Aganice, Athyrta, Berenice, Hipparchia and Occelo, who were connected with the Alexandrian School. Of the Greeks he names Aristocle and Athenais, and of Thessaly Aglaonice. But nothing definite is known about their achievement.
Davis likewise gives an account of Hildegarde, abbess of the monastery on Mount St. Rupert near Bingen on the Rhine. This learned woman, who lived from 1099 to 1180, wrote a book in Latin, in which some marvelous statements are claimed to have been made: 1. that the Sun is in the midst of the firmament retaining by its force the stars which move around it; 2. that when it is cold in the Northern hemisphere it is warm in the Southern, that the celestial temperature may thus be in equilibrium; 3. that the stars not only shine with unequal brilliancy but are themselves really unequal in magnitude; 4. that as blood moves in the veins and makes them pulsate, so do the stars move and send forth
199
