AGNESI, Maria Gaetana, an Italian lady preeminently distinguished for her scientific attainments, was born at Milan on the 16th of May 1718, her father being professor of mathematics in the university of Bologna. When only nine years old, she had such command of Latin as to be able to publish an elaborate address in that language, maintaining that the pursuit of liberal studies was not improper for her sex. By her thirteenth year she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, and other languages. She was in consequence generally known as “the Walking Polyglot.” Two years later her father began to assemble in his house at stated intervals a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. President De Brosses has given an interesting account of one of those meetings, at which he was present, in his Lettres sur l'Italie (tom. i. p. 243); and a permanent record of Agnesi’s share in them has been preserved in the Propositiones Philosophicoe, which her father caused to be published in 1738. These displays, being probably not altogether congenial to Maria, who was of a retiring disposition, ceased in her twentieth year, and it is even said that she had at that age a strong desire to enter a convent. Though the wish was not gratified, she lived from that time in a retirement almost conventual, avoiding all society, and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. The most valuable result of her labours was the Instituzioni Analitiche ad Uso della Gioventu Italiana, which was published at Milan in 1748. The first volume treats of the analysis of finite quantities, and the second of the analysis of infinitesimals. A French translation of the second -volume, by ...