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Mitchell, Maria, 1818-1889

"Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals"


"Whatever apology other women may have for loose, ill-finished work, or
work not finished at all, you will have none.
"When you leave Vassar College, you leave it the _best educated women in
the world_. Living a little outside of the college, beyond the reach of
the little currents that go up and down the corridors, I think I am a
fairer judge of your advantages than you can be yourselves; and when I
say you will be the best educated women in the world, I do not mean the
education of text-books, and class-rooms, and apparatus, only, but that
broader education which you receive unconsciously, that higher teaching
which comes to you, all unknown to the givers, from daily association
with the noble-souled women who are around you."
"1871. When astronomers compare observations made by different persons,
they cannot neglect the constitutional peculiarities of the individuals,
and there enters into these computations a quantity called 'personal
equation.' In common terms, it is that difference between two
individuals from which results a difference in the _time_ which they
require to receive and note an occurrence. If one sees a star at one
instant, and records it, the record of another, of the same thing, is
not the same.
"It is true, also, that the same individual is not the same at all
times; so that between two individuals there is a mean or middle
individual, and each individual has a mean or middle self, which is not
the man of to-day, nor the man of yesterday, nor the man of to-morrow;
but a middle man among these different selves.


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