Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/350

This page has been validated.
328
GER. GET. GIL.

and, in 960, she retook the city and fortress of Dijon, which had been treacherously given up to Robert of Treves, and had the traitor beheaded in the presence of the whole army.

GERMAIN, SOPHIA,

Born at Paris in 1776, made, at a comparatively early age, an extraordinary progress in the mathematical sciences, and, in 1816, obtained the prize of the Academy of Sciences for a memoir on the vibration of elastic laminae. She pursued this subject further in her "Recherches sur la théorie des surfaces élastiques," published in 1820; in another memoir presented to the Academy in 1826, and in an article in the "Anales de Physique et Chiraie," which appeared in 1828. During the revolution of the three days, she was quietly engaged at Paris in the preparation of a memoir on the curvature of surfaces, which was, when finished, inserted in "Crelle's Journal of the Mathematics." She died in 1831, of a cancer. Distinguished as she was by her acquirements and performances in the exact sciences, her attention had been far from being exclusively confined to them, but was, on the contrary, directed, in no inconsiderable degree, also to natural science, geography, history, and the speculations of philosophy.

GERSDORF, WILHELMINE VON,

Is a very voluminous German novelist; her writings are of the 'spirituelle' cast, and though comprising over thirty volumes, are sufficiently varied in scenes and characters to secure popularity, and encourage her unflagging industry.

GETHIN, LADY GRACE,

Was the daughter of Sir George Norton, of Abbots-Leith, in Somersetshire, and born in 1676. She was liberally educated, and married Sir Richard Gethin, of Gethin-grott, in Ireland. Lovely and beloved, and possessed of many and great accomplishments, both natural and acquired, she did not live long enough to display them to the world; for she died in her twenty-first year. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a beautiful monument is erected over her; and, moreover, for perpetuating her memory, provision was made for a sermon to be preached in the Abbey, yearly, on Ash-Wednesday, for ever. She wrote, and left behind her in loose papers, a work which, soon after her death, was published under the title of "Reliquiæ Grethineanæ; or some remains of the most ingenious and excellent lady. Lady Grace Grethin, lately deceased; being a collection of choice Discourses, pleasant Apothegms, and witty Sentences, written by her, for the most part by way of Essay, and at spare hours, 1700." This work consists of discourses upon friendship, love, gratitude, death, speech, lying, idleness, the world, secresy, prosperity, adversity, children, cowards, bad poets, indifferency, censoriousness, revenge, boldness, youth, age, custom, charity, reading, beauty, flattery, riches, honour, pleasure, suspicion, excuses, etc. It is now very scarce.

GILLIES, MARGARET.

This lady is a native of Scotland, where her early years were