the prescriptions too faithfully and too far, and balls and horseback riding, instead of curing her, brought on convulsions. Her disorders continued to increase immediately after the death of her mother, March 13, 1732, but she was subsequently gradually restored to quiet. This death gave rise to some changes in the family life, and Maria's father, who had five daughters and two sons by his first wife, was married a second time, February 23, 1734, to a Milanese lady, Mariana Pezzi. Two children resulted from this union, which was unfortunately brief, the second Madame Agnesi dying August 19, 1737, at the age of twenty-three years.
As a means of consolation in the grief that had fallen upon her father's household, Agnesi extended the field of her knowledge, and at last found her true' career in the cultivation of philosophy and mathematics. She was not destined, it is true, to make a very prominent mark, but simply to occupy a highly honorable place among the great algebraists of the eighteenth century. Father Manera, of Cremona, and Father Michaelo Casati, professor in the Royal University at Turin, who was afterward (in 1754) nominated Bishop of Moudoir, taught her logic, metaphysics, Euclid's elements, and physics. She soon acquired great proficiency in all these sciences, and sustained theses in the presence of qualified persons. In these assemblies, after having discussed and refuted the arguments of her antagonists, she was accustomed to express her own opinions in very pure Latin. Her sister, Maria Teresa, an accomplished musician, introduced the artistic element into these meetings, which at last became so celebrated that princes and illustrious travelers passing through Milan often attended them. Many persons retained pleasant recollections of them, as is attested by the following passage from De Brosses' Letters from Italy, which is cited in M. Robière's excellent book on Women in Science, and which we quote as the story of a witness: "I would like to tell you, Mr. President, of a kind of literary phenomenon I have recently witnessed, and which has seemed to me something more stupendous than even the Duomo of Milan, and at the same time I was not taken unawares. I have just been to Signora Agnesi's, where I told you yesterday I was going. I was introduced into a large apartment, where I found thirty persons of all the European nations arranged in a circle, and Mademoiselle Agnesi seated alone with her younger sister on a sofa. She is eighteen or twenty years old, neither pretty nor plain, with a very simple and pleasant expression. First, plenty of iced water was brought in, which seemed to me a good augury. I was anticipating, when I went in, only an ordinary conversation with the lady; but instead of that. Count Belloni, with whom I was, now planned a kind of public act. He began by making the young lady a fine
