Maria Mitchell was

one of America’s first professional astronomers, and she came to international

fame with her discovery of new comet in 1847. She was one of the

original members of the faculty of Vassar College, which was founded in

1864. Her journals and letters are filled with writings about science and education,

and her writing is often poetical and vivid. The Eye that Directs a

Needle is a setting of the following excerpt from her journal:

“Dec. 26, 1854. They

were wonderful men, the early astronomers. That was a great conception,

which now seems to us so simple, that the earth turns upon its axis, and a

still greater one that it revolves about the sun (to show this last was worth a

man’s lifetime, and it really almost cost the life of Galileo). Somehow we are

ready to think that they had a wider eld than we for speculation, that truth

being all unknown it was easier to take the rst step in its paths. But is the region of

truth limited? Is it not innite?…

We know a few things which were once hidden, and being known they seem easy;

but there are the ashings of the

Northern Lights; there is the conical zodiacal beam seen so beautifully in the

early evenings of spring and the early mornings of autumn; there are the

startling comets, whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and ickering variable

stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric showers–and for all of

these the reasons are as clear as for the succession of day and night; they lie

just beyond the daily mist of our minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced

through it.”

– from the

journal of Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)